Protection advisers must engage with social media and here's how they can do it effectively, says Lifesearch's Ricky Butler.
Ten years ago if you wanted to find a retail service or locate a company you'd have let your fingers do the walking through the yellow pages.
But today you don't read paper, you read online pages. And you no longer just want to find a company - you want to know what others think of it and what information it can give you (for free) to impress you - followed by immediate answers to the questions this information creates.
In financial services it is no different. Customers want good online content, almost always starting their search with a question on Google, Bing or Yahoo, and often looking for recommendations or sharing their own positive experiences with others, through quick an easy tools that are today's electronic word of mouth.
Consumers are happy to engage and take advice from people they can feel they have formed a bit of a relationship with, but often only if they trust that businesses through its digital presence.
An engaging website, being easy to interact with online, being visible and impressive on social media, as well as having many positive endorsements scattered across the web all help to build to foster a reassuring confidence. First impressions count and online is where most clients now get their first impression.
Social Media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube are all business tools which can generate new contacts. Many people see social media as one more new form of communication, but new ways of communicating don't automatically replace the old ones, they just to add to them.
Businesses may have stopped sending letters when email came of age, but they didn't stop picking up the phone. Likewise few ignore email just because they have a telephone or an active Facebook page.
Unlike older marketing methods social media is very low cost, but can be time intensive.
Many advisers might be put off by the time it takes to develop a genuine presence, but there are tools out there that can help, most of which are free.
Many tell me that it's a nice to have rather than a must have but that's true of all marketing until you want to make a decent splash, and with social media growing all the time advisers can't afford to ignore it
Don't rush into it though. Social media is a slow burn and one of the worst things is to have a social media presence but not to use it, which is arguably worse than having no presence at all. Imagine looking for a restaurant and finding a website that is three years out of date. Are you going to book that restaurant?
At LifeSearch we are confident that this is a space we need to play in because we know our clients are already using it.
Twitter and LinkedIn are probably the best places to start and we know we can reach new customers through them, we know we can generate new business and it is also a great tool for customer service, feedback and research. And we think a decent social media strategy adds to the value of our business too.
And let us not forget, you don't need to be on social media in order to be on social media.
Have you checked lately if your company has been mentioned?
You don't need an account for people to talk about you, so you might already be there without realising it. And of course it's a truism that communicating in social media isn't so much about what you want to say, it's really about what consumers want to hear.
Our @YourHealthFacts account is our initial attempt at doing exactly this. Rather than talking about insurance products, prices, trusts and so on, this account talks about health issues in a positive way.
It is building slowly through regular engagement and in particular through infographics such as THIS
Ricky Butler is head of development at LifeSearch
