This is why your financial advice firm needs to be on social media

1. Marketing
   Marketing is the most commonly used social media activity. Financial advice organisations use social media to run marketing campaigns to build brand awareness, engage with customers, promote events and share corporate news.

2. Sales
   Sales on social media refers to analysing information available in social channels to aid your sales strategies and pursuits¹. Social selling can be as simple as sending a private message to a prospect on LinkedIn.

3. Customer Service
   Social media is now the ‘channel of choice’ for customer services requests and responses. Companies are able to use social media to respond to their customers efficiently and effectively. It is cost effective and your customer service team are able to respond with little delay.

4. Employee Advocacy
   Employee advocacy refers to the promotion of an organisation by its workforce. It is often used to showcase an authentic view of the business to attract talent and foster employee engagement².
   
   

Challenges for financial services organisations adopting social media

As mentioned above, there are four key areas of social media activity and these are often owned by different departments of the company. This can present a challenge if you’re trying to write an organisational social media strategy that works towards one goal. Unless there is total collaboration on social media usage, platform use, and how the data is collected and used, you risk presenting a disjointed and misaligned message to your market, which can do more harm than good.

Many financial services organisations still find crafting their messaging for social media a challenge as well as recognising their audience³. As a result of the heavily regulated environment in which they operate, the financial services industry is often cautious of their messages on social media - sometimes overly so.

With that being said, there are ways that you can easily move past those challenges to have a great social media presence that will see your business strive for the future.

1. Set a strategy
   Come up with a plan. It doesn’t need to be a 20-page document. It just needs to ensure you know the message you’re trying to convey and guides you towards figuring out the best campaigns to suit that. Involve all areas of the business to ensure consistency - although different departments are trying to get their message across, the language needs to be concise and on brand.

2. Encourage employees to be active on social media
   Ensure your employees know the message and empower them to be present on social media. The connections your employees may have are often greater than any paid social media. Employee advocacy is the most underused social media strategy, but it is a fantastic way to build trust in your brand

3. Consolidate platforms
   Ensure collaboration between departments when working on social media. Use one platform to schedule and collate data which will be much more efficient in the long run when figuring out what works and what doesn’t for your social media strategy.

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¹ "Social Selling Strategies for Financial Services", CRM Search

² "The Social Business Report 2018", Hootsuite

³ "Banks' Social Media Challenges", The Financial Brand