Two of the top questions that we get are, “How can I promote myself as a financial advisor?” and “How do I make my brand stand out on social media?” And we always tell them how important it is to share content and engage on social media. But with 3.96 billion people on social media, how can you stand out from the crowd? We’re sharing eight ways to make your brand stand out on social media.
8 Ways to Stand Out on Social Media as a Financial Advisor
We’re going to dive into different tactics you can utilize on social media to help your brand stand out, plus different types of posts you should do.
1. Make Sure You Are Engaging
Social media is all about being social! If you aren’t engaging with others, you’re missing out on an opportunity to grow your connections and create meaningful conversations. Something to keep In mind is the 80/20 rule for social media, which means that you share only 20% of your brand’s content and 80% of “other” interesting content. So, for every post that you do, you should comment on five other posts.
Make sure your comments are impactful and really share what you do. When commenting, think about who in your network you trying to connect with more and comment on the posts of the audience and industry that you are trying to tap into.
2. Share Your Take on Recent Headlines
Lately, it seems like it’s one major headline after another, and sharing your recent take on breaking news is a great way to share your thoughts and really generate some meaningful conversation. Timely content and breaking news is a great way to connect with your audience, especially as we have spent increasingly more time online. So, start a conversation about what’s happening in the news by taking a news headline, a research report, a stat, or something that’s breaking and then give your opinion on it.
The stock market and all its volatility have been on top of everyone’s mind, so sharing any insight into this on social is a great idea. Dorsey Wealth Management offers fee-only wealth management and retirement planning for women and couples, and they do a great job of creating and sharing content that answers pressing questions and pertains to their clients, as well. In this blog, “What Should You Do About Inflation and Stock Market Volatility?” Angela Dorsey offers some great advice about staying calm and the next steps that you should be taking and then shares it on social to get even more eyes on the article.
3. Ask and Answer Specific Questions
Asking a question is an excellent way to create meaningful conversation. A different way to do this is to have a Q&A with a team member where you can ask a question that will really inform your audience. If you do this with different team members, maybe once a month or so, this is a good way to get multiple people with different areas of expertise.
4. Tailor Your Posts to Your Niche
When it comes to connecting with your audience and getting more for your marketing dollar, catering to your niche is crucial. Tailor your posts and share content that your niche can find useful and that they can relate to. If you cater to pre-retirees or retirees, then share content that relates to that group.
For example, C.L. Sheldon & Company has an extremely unique niche, catering to active and retired military members, and so their social posts reflect that.
President Curtis Sheldon, CFP®, EA, AIF® shares “Curt’s Chalk Talk” with an eye-catching emoji discussing what happens if you deploy in the middle of March and it’s time to do your taxes. This is obviously a very unique issue that only military members will deal with, so this should get a lot of engagement and really help the niche.
5. Summarize Breaking News and the Impact It Could Have On Your Clients
When something significant happens, your clients want to know that they are in good hands and that you can guide their financial future accordingly. An example of this could be the recent bear market. How will your clients be impacted by this? It’s important to keep the lines of communication open, especially when it is something such as market volatility. And one way to do this is to create a piece of content that summarizes the market volatility and what it could mean for your clients or prospects.
Including infographics and charts is important when it comes to a topic like this, especially since most people are visual learners, and seeing past charts demonstrating other times of market volatility will help advisors to explain this better.
6. Include Strong Imagery
According to Forbes, you only have about 7 seconds to make a strong first impression. Make sure you’re only including important content that really wows. You want to create something that “stops the scroll,” and including strong images is a great way to do this. In fact, posts with images receive 2.3 times more engagement than those without, while tweets with photos receive an average of 35% of retweets. You can even create your own image in Canva, a great and FREE tool for non-designers so that they can create beautiful images to share on social media, in blogs, etc.
WealthKeel has a post every week called “The WealthKeel Weekly,” where Founder Chad Chubb CFP®, CSLP®, shares a post with an eye-catching one where he summarizes a roundup of some great articles from the week. Not only is it eye-catching, but whoever he tags or shares their content will probably retweet, plus it will make them more likely to post something of his in the future.
7. Don’t Be Afraid to Get Personal
Get personal every once in and while by sharing a picture of your family or a pet or something awesome that one of your colleagues accomplished. Clients and prospects want to see the real “you,” and sharing this type of post make you seem more relatable and “human.” Johnny Sandquist, the Founder of Three Crowns Marketing & Copywriting, is very active on social media and does a great job of mixing both industry posts and personal posts. He shares a lot of content from conferences or gives us a sneak peek into what’s going on at his office, and it makes for a very engaging Twitter feed!
8. Use Hashtags and Tag Other People
On LinkedIn, we would recommend three hashtags per post, as this will help your post to show up in different groups, so think about the ones that you want more people to see you in. When we create hashtags, we usually use the hashtags #WealthManagement, #FinancialPlanning, or something like that. Additionally, tagging others is a great way to get the conversation going quickly, which gets more eyes on your post, and the quicker that happens, the better it is for the algorithm.
As you can tell in this post Jeanne Sutton, CFP®, CPFA, MBA, has included hashtags and tagged multiple people in order to get the conversation going.
Wrapping It Up
Does your social media strategy have what it takes? It takes work to get started, and it’s important to remain consistent, but if you do, the payoff is incredible! You’ll be able to grow your business and connect with so many more people and businesses that you were not able to before. We hope that these tips and examples help you boost your strategy and continue to grow.
Struggling with What to Share on Social Media?
