Financial planning businesses that aren’t harnessing social media effectively could be overlooking a tool for generating significant client loyalty and referrals, and one that could even make the implementation of opt in easier.
Yesterday, dealer group Australian Financial Services (AFS) launched a mobile application that will enable it to communicate more effectively with its own advisers, and announced plans for phase two of the project, which will empower its advisers to communicate with clients.
AFS’s tool works on a smart phone or tablet and is designed to deliver small, bite-sized pieces of information – including news feeds and video – in a format that advisers can easily and quickly pass on to clients. In turn, clients will also be able to pass on information to friends or colleagues.
And next week, Financial Services Partners (FSP) will unveil social media services for its planning practices that include assistance for website creation, establishing a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and creating content for advisers to use across its range of platforms.
Social media is sometimes described simply as a mechanism for allowing users to choose the way in which they prefer to receive information.
Peter Bowman, head of marketing for FSP, says advisers who are not actively engaged with clients through multiple social media platforms will find it more difficult to network, prospect for clients and staff, and to establish themselves as opinion leaders.
But far from being a daunting proposition, Bowman says establishing an effective social media presence requires an understanding of the different functions served by the different platforms and knowing what kind of information works on each.
It doesn’t even necessarily require putting a lot of additional effort into producing content. FSP, like most dealer groups, already produces a lot of information for advisers – information that advisers can use to communicate with clients.
“We were worried at the start, but we took a step back and had a look at the content we already had,” Bowman says.
He says it is relatively simple to adapt this material to make it suitable for publication on social media platforms.
“We’re taking it to our clients through social media.”
Bowman says advisers need to understand how different platforms operate and whet they are best used for.
“I think LinkedIn is about networking, Facebook is about prospecting and referrals, and Twitter is about opinion leading,” he says.
But underpinning all of these, an advisory practice must have a website that is well structured, looks attractive and is regularly updated. Bowman says this is where FSP can step in to help advisers – not only constructing and maintaining websites, but producing content for advisers to publish.
Total engagement: get on the front foot Bowman says it’s important for planners to be on the front foot. Clients are going to talk about their planners anyway, so planners need to be engaged in that conversation.
Adam Franklin, marketing manager for bluewiremedia, who consulted to FSP on the development of its services, says social media is “about people having a choice of how they interact with you”.
The key to successful content is “quality, not quantity,” Franklin says. There’s no idea frequency, but when something is published, it needs to be engaging.
“You should never be pumping out stuff just because you can,” Franklin says.
“But if you are doing quality, then quality is what people are going to share, and quality is what people are going to link to.”
Bowman says “social media, for me, provides an opportunity to build an old-fashioned prospecting database online”.
“It allows people to try you and to see what you’re all about before they decide to buy from you,” he says.
“It allows an adviser to become an opinion leader to their clients. This is one of the big points I hear all the time from advisers: clients go home, they listen to the news – the share market has crashed and the world is over.
“Who would an adviser prefer they listen to?”
AFS managing director Peter Daly says the effective use of technology to improve communication between practices and advisers, and between advisers and clients, has “the potential to revolutionise the financial planning industry”.
“This is only the first phase of the launch,” Daly says.
According to Daly, once clients are used to receiving and responding to information pushed to them by advisers, it may have implications for how advisers use the technology to hep them comply with coming regulatory changes – particularly opt in.
The chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services (PJC), Bernie Ripoll, has consistently said that opt in should not be an onerous requirement and that it may in some cases be satisfied with something as simple as a response to a text message.
Daly says the level of interaction between planners and clients that the AFS tool will foster means that it’s an ideal way to comply with the proposed new law.
“The way we’re thinking and our interpretation of FoFA, I’m pretty sure it’s going to satisfy many of those objectives.”
Daly says people are hardwired to want to share information. Information pushed to AFS to its advisers can be shared between advisers and clients, making the adviser look good in the eyes of the client; and information pushed to clients by AFS advisers can be shared by clients with other people, making the client look good and cementing the value of the relationship between the client and adviser.
