Social media and online marketing continue to challenge financial planning practices, with many individuals struggling to transfer their personal and business online presence to client-facing relationship-management systems.
While research consistently finds that the adviser community is open to new ideas on how to engage with customers, few are making the most of social media despite now having the hardware to do so.
This lack of take-up is hardly unique to the Australian financial services sector, with the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Society of the UK recently publishing a survey that reveals 65 per cent of its members are struggling to use information to gain an edge over their competitors, even though 87 per cent still believe it is possible.
The education and training body, which represents the interests of about 10,000 investment professionals in the UK, also found that less than half of its members feel their firms have appropriate systems and processes to generate an information advantage.
The Financial Planning Association (FPA) acknowledged this new era earlier in the year when it launched its first social media strategy. And earlier this year, a found respondents largely negative about whether financial services companies could effectively position themselves to offer trustworthy and useful information through social media platforms.
But where does the individual adviser stand in an increasingly crowded online environment where profiles need to be attractive and relevant?
Zurich’s Australian Life and Investments business (Zurich) recently released research into financial adviser usage of social media and new technology, finding that 40 per cent use social media for communication, 40 per cent use it for advertising or promotion and 20 per cent use it for networking.
Of the advisers polled 48.5 per cent use Facebook, 39.9 per cent use Linkedin, 27.8 per cent for YouTube and 10.3 per cent are on Twitter.
Most indicated they would increase their use of Linkedin in 2012, reflecting the transition from advisers’ personal use of social media to business applications.
Certainly advisers now have the tools to underpin this online presence with the use of smartphones and tablets increasing rapidly over the past year.
Apples, Androids and infographics
The Zurich survey found that 81.4 per cent of advisers own a smartphone, with the iPhone dominant across all age groups although competitors have recently started narrowing the gap.
At the start of 2011 just 9.4 per cent of advisers owned a tablet, but this increased to 34 per cent a year later with 21 per cent of advisers now using this to present information to clients.
Zurich also concluded that the popularity of infographics was assisting advisers in presenting large amounts of complicated information to clients in easily digestible pieces.
Zurich’s general manager of retail life and investments, Philip Kewin, said infographics are experiencing a significant increase in popularity, especially through social media platforms.
“They allow you to present complex statistics in a more engaging way, allowing the real story behind the numbers to be more easily comprehended,” he says.
“2011 was undoubtedly the year of the tablet and undoubtedly the year of the iPad for financial advisers.
“However, the dominance seen by Apple in the tablet and smartphone markets is gradually being eroded as competitors up the ante with the quality and functionality of their devices.
“We have been running an ongoing series of ‘bootcamps’ around Australia for advisers who are just getting into the tablet and social media space, and each week that goes by we are seeing a higher proportion of attendees bringing along their new Android devices.”
Our experience across varying user types and geographies is that social media is in limited use (but the same could be said of effective websites), yet some very successful examples. However demand for solutions is high, as it is for use of tablets generally and for use engaging with clients. For example, a solution to efficiently monitor client activity across all social media channels is already tightly integrated in XPLAN. Advisers need solutions that assist, not pressured headlines.
Like all new technologies and technology features, use is not uniformly distributed, which is what establishes leaders and followers.