The 7 Biggest Mistakes Advisors Make on Social + How to Fix Them

Hi, everyone, and welcome to today’s workshop.

I’m Samantha Russell. We’ll just give everybody another minute or two to sign in. I wanted to start about or actually press go live about a minute early because we have such a large group. I know some of you, were waiting in the waiting room because you didn’t wanna get, kicked out or miss it.

If for some reason you do have to leave early and you can’t get back in because we do have such a large audience today, just know that this will be recorded, and it will be sent to you as well as all of the slides as well as all of, the resources that we are gonna share. But this is a workshop, meaning I am not just gonna be showing slides to you. I am also going to be actually pulling up LinkedIn, pulling up Facebook, going live in these platforms, to show you how things are done. And on that note, I would love it if anybody wants to be a volunteer, would like me to pull up their page on either Facebook or LinkedIn.

And, if we have time, I’d love to use one of you as a real example, to kinda go through and show things that you can change on your actual profile page, whether it’s your business or your personal one. So if that’s something you’d be interested in, you can add it into the q and a box.

That way we can just keep track of it. It doesn’t get buried in the chat. And if we have time at the end, we will, do that. So while we’re waiting for everyone to, sign in, again, I’m Samantha Russell. I’m the chief evangelist here at FMG.

I absolutely love, being active on social media, connecting with people on social media, and just what social media can do to grow a business, especially on a small budget. So I’m so excited to share with you all of the things I’ve learned over the years, and really using social media to grow because it, you know, can often just seem like a special cryptic code. And once you crack the code, it just really all of a sudden starts flowing. So if you would let us know in the chat, maybe how you heard about today’s webinar, and was it from email initially or social media?

You know, LinkedIn, Twitter, an ad, or was it email? That would be really helpful. We’ll kinda see how everybody heard about it today, as we’re waiting to get started. So we are seeing lots of emails.

I saw a couple of LinkedIns.

Let’s see. Lots of emails. Thank you everybody for responding. So this is one thing that I really, really wanna hone in on is if you are hosting webinars, you will find that email is the number one way to actually get registrants, to get, you know, butts in the seat. We’re gonna talk about all the different ways social media is amazing. But if you’re trying to actually, create an event and get people to sign up for it, it really is great to do it via email.

And I’m gonna show you, though, how you can also promote it in some other ways. And thank you for everybody who submitted. I can see we already have sixteen people who raised their hand, for me to review their LinkedIn or Facebook page. Again, if you’re interested in that, just drop your URL in the q and a.

Alright. So we are gonna go ahead and get started. For those of you just joining, again, I’m Samantha Russell. I’m the chief evangelist here at FMG.

If we are not connected already on LinkedIn or Twitter, those are the two platforms I use the most for work. Those are my handles. I’d love to, connect with you. And this is just a picture of my family just this past weekend from Easter.

Happy Easter to anyone who celebrated.

And I’m sharing a personal photo because that is one of the things we’re gonna talk about on social media today is how tying in things that are personal really, really make a difference when it comes to social media. So that is my family, and my email is also there in case anybody has anything follow-up related they, wanna chat about. And so who’s FMG?

Let us know in the chat. Do you currently use FMG, for your marketing? We’d love to know. But FMG is an award winning marketing suite, and these are just some of the awards we’ve won in the last few years, which is just crazy.

We’re so excited by the recognition we’re getting, and we just in the last, year and a half, I’d say, started our do it for me marketing program, which I’m also gonna share a little bit more with you about. But regardless of what marketing tools or content you’re using, we’re gonna have tons of tips for you today, to teach you things that you can use regardless of how you’re doing your marketing. So welcome to everyone who is an FMG customer. And if, you’re not, thank you for being here, and welcome to you as well.

Alright. So we’re gonna start by going over the seven social media mistakes that I see most often and then what you should be doing instead. And, again, I’m gonna be going back and forth between the slides and also live in the browser showing you, the social platforms.

So the number one mistake, if you leave here today and you don’t take away anything else, the number one mistake that I want you to remember is that if you don’t follow the eighty twenty rule, you will not see results on social media, period. End of sentence. This is the most important thing.

So let me know. Does anybody know what the eighty twenty rule is? Maybe just say yes or you’ve heard me talk about it before in the chat because I’ve talked about it in a lot of social media, presentations I’ve given. And, basically, what it is is that for every one thing you post to your own feed, you should be leaving comments on five other people’s posts.

So let’s talk about this and why this is so important. Right?

If you think about social media, if you don’t yet have a big following, you’re trying to grow. If you post something, the only people who see your posts are who. It’s the people that you’re already connected to. Right? So let’s just, for a quick second, go into my LinkedIn, for example. Can everybody see my LinkedIn screen here? Let’s just make sure we can all see it.

Okay. Great. Thank you for those saying yes. So here’s my LinkedIn page, and, right, I come in here, and we can see the different posts that are here.

So let’s just choose Lacey here for a second. So if Lacey posts something, the people that are gonna see Lacey’s post we’ll click on her page for a minute. She’s got one thousand nine hundred and four followers. The people who are gonna see Lacey’s posts are those one thousand nine hundred and four followers.

So how does she get her content in front of people she’s not already connected to? Does anyone have any ideas of what she can do to get her content that she’s posting in front of other people besides paying for an ad? Right? We don’t wanna pay.

We wanna do this for free. So as Kareem said hashtags, hashtags is one way, that you can do that. It’s I will say the success rate varies because a lot of people who are using hashtags are using it to grow their business. The end consumer you’re trying to reach isn’t always.

Another person said, we what about tagging someone in the post? That is a great way to get that person specifically to see it because they’re going to, get a notification, right, saying Samantha Russell tagged you in the post. One of the best things that could you can do in order to get more people to see your post is get as many comments as you can. Okay?

And that is because all of the people that are commenting on this post let’s say Colleen leaves a comment, and let’s pretend Colleen has five thousand followers.

Not all of Colleen’s followers are also gonna be following Lacey, but they’ll be able to potentially see in the feed that she left a comment on Lacey’s content, and it will show up in their feed.

Does that make sense to everyone? Let’s see if I can find one, to for you to see. But this is why leaving comments on other people’s posts is one of the best things you can do because what’s going to happen is now, first of all, they’re gonna say, who’s Samantha Russell? And go click over to your page to check you out.

But number two, all of the people that you’re commenting on, when you finally post something, the way the algorithm works, your post is gonna be a lot more likely to be in their feed. And then if they leave a comment on it, it’s gonna be more likely to be shown to their network. So it just keeps building on itself. So you can see the reason that this is being shown to me is because Tyrone gave it a thumbs up. So I was shown it even though we’re, you know, first connections.

But if I I’m just gonna try to scroll through here and see if I can find a second degree, connection that that, will give you a good example. While I’m looking for that, I did just see somebody ask the question, you know, can you give an example of how to make a comment that does not look like AI? And that’s a great question. So let’s just say here, we have Michael’s post about, the newest retirement income literacy survey, and they find that only twenty six percent of respondents know that, you know, the average person will live to eighty five. Most people think it’s seventy five or eighty, and then they talk about how longevity, you know, can impact that.

So you can go in and leave a comment, and you wanna just be doing something that’s gonna add to the conversation, shed new light, or maybe offer a differing opinion. So you might say something like, while this is really fascinating, we have found in our firm that the opposite is true. I can’t spell opposite today, or true, apparently. You know, most of our clients are are overestimating.

You know, you could say you could take a contrarian view, or you can say something like, we have a hundred percent found this to be true, and here’s some things we’re doing with our clients to help them wrap their minds around this. Right? So you don’t wanna just say great point or great article. You wanna add to the conversation in some way.

So, hopefully, that helps. For people, saying, does this apply to all platforms? Yes. So if you’re trying to grow on Facebook as well, you need to be doing this on Facebook.

If you’re trying to grow, you know, using other platforms, I know some advisers starting using Instagram or even YouTube. You need to be leaving comments on other profile pages if you want to be growing.

So that is the first thing we’re gonna talk about. So let me just go back to this, slide deck here and keep the questions in the comments coming. I love all of, what I’m seeing in the chat, and it’s really helpful to see it. So, again, you every day, let’s say you you know, three times a week, you have something you’re gonna post. You want that day to pick five other people’s, posts to leave comments on.

Okay?

Now one thing to know is let’s a lot of you have this automated. If you’re with FMG, you’re with our do it for me program, we’re posting on your behalf, which is a wonderful thing. But one of the best ways that you can, you know, we we call basically prime the algorithm. Let the algorithm know that they should be showing your content to more people is to leave your comments before your post goes up. So that’s why I always tell people first thing in the morning, spend just, like, five minutes or so, and, you know, leave your comments then. That really, really makes a big difference.

I just saw a a comment in there about let’s see.

This is from Kristen. She said I was doing the leaving, you know, five comments per day for a few months, and the only new connections I was getting on LinkedIn were those that were trying to sell me something, not potential clients. So this is a great segue, Kristen. I’m sorry for your experience, but one of the things that you really wanna do, if you can, is really be specific about who you’re choosing to leave comments on.

So let’s say you were you know, you want to you you have a specific niche and you wanna get more Microsoft employees as part of your, client base. Right? You can come in here. You can see, okay, which of my connections already work at Microsoft, or you can filter by all their employees.

Then you can go through and you could click on somebody and see, do they have something that you could post about? So Britney has something about b two b marketing. I could leave a comment about b two b marketing, what kind of marketing I do because I’m trying to land Microsoft as a client. I’m not saying anything about my business or selling her anything.

I could just say this is a great point. I try to teach our clients this, and now Britney is gonna go, who’s Samantha Russell? And click over to me. So being intentional about who you pick is really important, and do not be afraid to choose five people that you’ve never met before and have no association with.

That really, really, makes a difference.

Okay. Let’s see here.

And then I just wanted to show you because I was showing LinkedIn.

One thing to keep in mind is that helpful information is like a magnet. It really, really draws people to you. I have found over the last few years building up my social presence that as much as I can shell share helpful information in my own posts, when I respond to someone else’s post and really answer a question or give them guidance in any sort of way, it’s even considered to be better, and people trust me more because I’m not it seems like I’m just doing it to be nice. Right? They don’t realize that lots of other people can see it. And I am doing it to be nice in a way, and I like to help others, but it really does help to build your audience. So this is just an example from a Facebook Facebook group that I’m a part of.

And this is somebody who owns a tour company, a sailing company, but he doesn’t just say, hey. You know, we do private boat tours. Here’s our company. Right?

He answers her question so beautifully, giving her very specific advice, and then says, oh, about about the boat tour, you can look at your website our website or message me if you have questions. Right? So he’s giving her so much helpful information first. Now for all of you, when it comes to compliance, it oftentimes can be hard to get specific investment advice, but you can still answer questions in a way that is very helpful as long as you’re being, you know, transparent in explaining, you know, this is not investment advice.

This is all based on just what I can see in the post. You really need to talk to a financial professional, to get who can see your entire financial picture, and, you know, include those disclosures, but this is really the way. Alright. So mistake number one was the eighty twenty rule.

I we could spend an entire webinar on that, but I wanna make sure we get through everything. So I’m gonna keep going, but keep your comments and, questions coming. So mistake number two, this sounds really harsh, but there’s no other way to say it, is that you’re boring or at least your your social media presence is boring. So here is something I just saw two days ago that I thought was hilarious from Josh Brown, from Holt’s wealth.

And he said this post got almost zero engagement because it was obviously self promotional, contained no interesting information, and included a poorly cropped cropped image. Maybe if I do a hundred more posts like this, something different will happen. And And then below it, he said, and now I’m gonna tag two hundred people. Right?

It’s funny because it’s true, and we see this all of the time.

Just saying, read my blog post or, here’s what we, you know, can help you with is not going to do anything. I always equate it to if you went to a networking event and you had a big billboard and you walked around the room with a sign that said Samantha Russell marketing and then left and you didn’t talk to anyone, you didn’t engage with anyone, you didn’t establish any conversations, nothing would happen. And it’s the same thing on social media. Those conversations really, really make a big difference.

So here’s a couple just examples of posts that, you know, are are having some personality. Humor can go a long way. Right? This was just posted, yesterday or the day before.

What day is it? Whenever it was April second. So he has when it’s April second, but the fact that only eighteen percent of people are using a high yield savings account is still a joke.

That’s funny. It gets your attention. He has a quick little video talking about, you know, moving money into a high yield savings account if you still need cash on hand. Great, great example of, you know, quick content that works.

Visuals go such a long way. Right? And especially if they’re related to current events. So this is an example from Chris DeWolf, and he’s actually using an image from the FMG, social content library.

So if you’re an FMG customer, you should see this in there. And so this was what happens during the stock market typically during, election years. Right? And it’s just a really interesting visual that captures your attention and also has enough meat on it for people to respond to.

I think that there’s just this misconception that financial content in general is boring, and so I’d love to include this slide and decks before. But this post about an adviser talking about how he helped a couple, hit financial freedom early, and then he said, if you want me to share with you basically, like, what I did for them, comment below case study, and I’ll send it to you. He had seven hundred and sixty six comments on this post. And that is a great way also to get more comments is you can have something you offer, a video, a tutorial, a course, a blog post where you really go in deep, and you tell people, leave a comment below, and I’ll send it to you. That’s gonna get more comments because every single person who leaves a comment, it’s gonna be shown to everyone in their net.

I really want you to just think about when you’re thinking about how do I not be boring, how do I share things that get people thinking or talking, is to think and ask yourself, what will people leave comments on, or what will people reshare? Right? What’s gonna be helpful or interesting for your audience to know about? So if you serve a niche, obviously, there’s great examples, that I could do, but so many of you say, oh, I don’t have a really specific niche.

I just serve people in my local area. So here’s a great example, or tip for you. If you are just more in a local area, every week, do a social post where you just talk about events happening in your area. Post it on Friday for the upcoming weekend or Monday for the week ahead.

I know a few different advisers that do this, and it goes over so well. They’re getting new people following them just to see what events are coming up in the local area. Right? If you’re serving young families, if you’re serving, you know, retirees, you could talk about things that are happening that are good for them.

For, young families, these are, like, examples of date nights. So, again, you wanna think outside the box, but what’s gonna get people excited?

Okay.

So the next one is that you don’t use the what’s in it for me mindset. So I love this visual, which is the world’s first portable digital media player.

How much does that really capture your attention or get you excited versus a thousand songs in your pocket? Right?

The language that we use when we’re talking about something really matters. And so what I always like to think before I start, you know, writing a a post or an email or talking about my business is how do I frame it so that somebody should care. Right? Why why should they care? And so this is in another example of a post from, the FMG library.

This is, we do this collaboration with YCharts where they give us these great charts, and then we’ll create the social posts that go with it. And I can’t I didn’t have room on here, but on this particular post, you could see, you know, he had comments and engagement. And the opening line is, do you think your tax rate will be higher in the future? Right?

So something that’s gonna grab the attention of people who are getting ready to retire. So attention grabbing opening line and a good visual can go a really long way. The other thing, you know, is if you go into the FMG library, if you’re looking for more visuals, I just wanted to give this tip. We do we have a download section, which I can show you here.

And in the download section, we have these PowerPoint presentations that we’ve put together that you can use to host webinars and things like that. These also make fantastic visuals for social media. So you just open it up, take a screenshot of it, and share it, and it is really, really, really great. You can put your two cents on it, talk about it.

Just another way you can use these great resources if you’re interested.

Okay. So using the what’s in it for me mindset really, really goes a long way. I’m gonna go through, I’m gonna go back into the platform but I just wanted to go through these slides a little bit more.

Anybody here, if I ask you what was your best performing social media post of all time, most of you will probably tell me what, that it was something personal. Right? Like, you shared a photo of a grandchild or, or a child. You had a picture of your pet. You, had a a family photo, anything personal is really what’s going to get the most engagement.

Right? Because people connect with people. Oh, Dominic, me and my daughter at the nail salon getting our nails done. I need to see that photo. That’s so cute. So, yeah, Jody says anything about family or pets, food or animals, cat videos.

Why do we go to social media? It is not because we’re sitting there thinking, I need a new tax strategy. I’m gonna go to Facebook to find one. That’s not why we’re there.

Right? We’re bored for a second. We’re, you know, taking a breather from work, distracting ourselves. Whatever it is, we wanna connect with somebody, see what everyone in our community is up to.

So a great thing is if you can even take the, personal photo or whatever and tie it back to something that you’re doing. So, oh, Leonard just said shared a photo of our trip to Portugal and got over a thousand impressions. So you could talk about a trip you’re taking and then say, this is one of the things we really encourage our clients to do is, you know, plan for a retirement that they’re gonna love and be able to travel and enjoy. Right?

Emily here has a picture. How do you feel how do you feel when you look at your credit card balance after a trip and her son at Disney World making a silly face? She goes in to talk about giving yourself permission to spend on experiences and how she helps clients with that. So being able to share personal stories and antidotes and then connect it back to what you’re talking about is always going to perform the best, right, better than anything else that anyone can do.

And so, sadly, I can’t, post that personal stuff for you, but you don’t need to do this every day and nor should you because we’re still doing it for business. And at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be appropriate for Emily just to post pictures of her son every single day. Oh, I would love to see them.

So we need to have a mix, and that’s why this is just a part of the strategy. It’s not the whole strategy. Right?

Okay.

So that was personal. Now we’re on to the next one. I told you we’re gonna go through these fast so we’d have more time in the the apps here. Number five is that you have no opinion.

So if you talk to any I’m just gonna click back to this for a second. If you talk to any PR person or journalist and you ask them, you you know, hey. I wanna get featured more in The Wall Street Journal or in my local newspaper, they will tell you you have to have an opinion. Every if there’s something happening and everyone says the same thing, there’s really no reason to quote you.

Right? And so you might not have a contrarian viewpoint, but maybe you have a different way of saying it or a unique way of laying it all out there. Right? So having an opinion is really, really going to, a, help get more comments, b, have people notice what you’re talking about, and, c, start those conversations.

So this is just an example of a post I did that that really did that, where it was information from Fidelity about NextGen.

And I said this new generation does not want a financial adviser. Right? That was a hook that got a lot of people to pay attention. And then I went on to say they want a life coach with a side of of financial planning and investment management.

And I’m talking about just the way that, you know, the next gen is thinking about financial advice. But that first sentence captured so much attention and got people talking. Right? Makes a huge difference.

So here’s another one. This gentleman could have talked all about the different ways that billionaires use really convoluted tax strategies, But instead, he said, how to avoid taxes like a billionaire.

So much catchier and, you know, gets more more views. And, of course, I know everybody’s always gonna say, well, what about compliance? That’s something you obviously need to work with your compliance team and and make sure they’re approving, but I’ve seen advisers doing it. There’s ways to write in a way and still include all those disclosures and everything that, allow you to share those opinions.

Okay. The next mistake is not being consistent. So this is just an example. It looks like my slide move. I’m gonna move it over because that’s bothering me. Sorry, everybody.

There we go.

This is an example of the do it for me calendar. So some of you said, tell me more about do it for me. If you, are familiar with FMG, we have a series of marketing tools that allow advisers to automate their posts, to schedule them in advance, to use content from our library, which I’ll show you later. But we also, over the years, have heard from so many people who said, can you just do it all for me? I don’t even wanna use the technology.

So that is why we created this program, and it allows you to get connected with someone on our team who then will become your concierge, and they actually, every month, send you this calendar, and they say, here’s the social post going out. Here’s the emails going out. Here’s the automations, the blogs.

And, oh, by the way, throughout the month, if something happens, we would even post additional timely information on your behalf. So this is an example of one when CPI was the lowest in two years. We emailed people in the program saying, hey. Do you want us to post about this on social media?

It’s ready to go. You can look at it. So this is comes to that consistency. Right?

Doing the personal post, you know, you don’t need to do that every single week as we talked about. That’s gonna get more eyeballs. It’s gonna get more people aware of your brand, but it’s not every week kind of a thing necessarily.

But you do need to have that consistency overall so so that when people are going to your page, they can see what you are an expert in and what you can help them with. So the you know, what I see a lot of people have the most success with is they work with us or they have a plan, an editorial calendar.

Ahead of time, they plan out what they’re going to post week after week. But then every day is where they’re going in or maybe three times a week, and they’re doing the eighty twenty rule with the comments.

So you’re able to really plan ahead, automate a lot of the posts, and then what you have to do day in and day out is leaving those comments. Does that make sense to everyone? I’d love to know for those of you on today’s call, how many of you know what is going to be posted to your social media next week or even this week? Is it planned out, or do you sort of do it haphazardly?

Let us know because that would be really interesting to see from everybody where everybody’s at, with how much they’re structuring it.

Okay.

So I’m seeing some plan, not planned. It’s chaotic.

I have the whole month planned. Alright. That’s awesome.

Planning ahead more varies how much capacity we have. So and that’s another thing I’ve seen a lot too is people will be good at social media for a while, and then they get busy, they get more clients, and then they fall off. Right? So that’s where planning it month by month really makes a big difference.

This was just another example of something I saw that I thought was a great idea.

You know, you can say things like, hey. You know, here’s seven things to think about. Leave a comment of which one of these would be your top concern. This is just another way to get, you know, more more comments.

So with consistency, being top of mind, you know, how do you oh, I’m sorry. Something just glitched there. So this is just another example of of getting of getting more comments. Okay.

So let’s move on to number seven, which so we can talk about Facebook groups, and then that will give us lots of time to go into the apps. So I’m seeing lots of people who are saying that they plan monthly, but then go into the apps daily, which is an awesome strategy, or plan out a few weeks at a time and then add things as they come up. That’s optimally what we want for consistency. The number one, you know, thing I hear when it comes to consistency that people get wrong is that they give up too soon.

It takes a while to really build a following. And, oh, you know what? I’m just gonna skip ahead before we get to this Facebook groups part. I have some extra slides down here, that are gonna come to you all, but let me just show you this.

Two ways really quickly, specifically on LinkedIn. This won’t work for everything. But I have two things that I have done strategically. I did do for years while I was really trying to grow my base, which was that every single Friday, I would go through the last five days of the calendar, and I would copy the person’s name and look them up on LinkedIn.

And then I would invite them to connect. So, you know, you have a meeting with them on your calendar, you have their email, you can look them up this way. And this was just such a great way to not let those connections slip through the cracks, those conversations go cold. Now that person is gonna keep seeing my content.

It’s really, really easy to do, and you can even have an admin do it. Right? They sign into your account and do it and can have a quick little, message saying, like, nice meeting you. You could also do this proactively for the week ahead, although I prefer to do it from the week prior just because in case more meetings get added. So if anybody does this, let us know and has it worked for you well.

I have really, really seen a drastic increase just by doing this one tactic. It makes a huge difference. And I also, for a while, was doing the same thing with email. So I would get get an email from somebody, and I go through all my emails. So not even if we met in person, but all the emails of people that I, you know, wanted to connect with on LinkedIn and added them there too. So those two things alone can make a huge difference in growing your network.

Alright.

Let’s go back to the Facebook groups. Let me know in the comments how many of you belong to any Facebook group, you know, whether it’s a local mom’s group, a local community group, a group for trip planning, a group for an interest or a hobby that you have.

Okay. I’m seeing lots of yeses.

How many of you have ever gotten a client because somebody said, I’m looking for a financial adviser and someone else referred them to you. Has that ever happened?

Because oh, yes. We’re getting lots of yeses and several. Okay. So this is a fantastic thing when this happens, but one of the things that I’ve really learned is that you can really instead of just waiting for it to happen passively, you can really get in the driver’s seat and make this, something that proactively you can be proactive about and working for you.

Right? So Facebook groups are all across the country for those of you that are not in one, and they’re really underutilized, I’m finding, by most advisers. There’s a local area group for pretty much every area in the country you can think of, and people are constantly asking for advice. Hey.

I have a question about an HSA. Hey.

We need to update our estate planning. Do you know a good estate planning attorney? Hey. We need a new adviser.

This is such a ripe opportunity for advisers. Now what I’m going to suggest, though, is when you belong to these groups, you do not just self promote because that is the quickest way for people to just feel like you’re a salesy, sleazy person trying to sell your stuff. Right? But instead, when they ask a question that’s more ancillary, right, does anyone know a good CPA, You can refer a CPA to them and say, and, you know, we work with them all the time.

We have a great relationship.

She’s a great a great accountant. I highly recommend her. And just by you saying, you know, we work with her all the time with our clients.

Or maybe they’re asking an estate planning question, you can refer them to someone. Or maybe you answer the question, as much as you can in a very broad way and then say, hey. If you wanna discuss further, you know, let me know, and I can give you some more some more info.

So don’t just take my word for it. These are just two messages that I got, recently from advisers telling me, you know, how much it has helped them. And, Eric there actually just did a podcast, which I’m sure we can get the link for, where he talked about how he used Facebook. Specifically, he did, like, a good twenty minute conversation on how he used it to get twenty new clients next year.

So that’s really interesting if you wanna look up Encore State Plans podcast and give it a listen. But, basically, all you’re gonna do is you’re gonna belong to the local groups. Right? Go to Facebook.

I’m gonna pull you up pull it up here. I’m gonna show you a couple different ones that I have. So here’s this one in my local town called Happy Valley Moms.

And once you’re in the group, you can come over here and search the group for questions. So I just searched estate, and you can see here, right, question for a home buyer, real estate question, looking for a local lawyer for estate planning, power of a will, attorney work. And then you can go into the comments, and you can see people are giving different advice. But if you specialize in helping people go through divorce, you could say, oh, something else you might not be considering is x, y, or z, and give them just, like, an extra tip. Or maybe I wrote a whole blog post about this topic. You can, you know, read it here or a whole article specifically for women going through divorce. So that is definitely the best way to do it is to provide helpful information.

I’m getting, people asking, should we be doing this through, our personal profile or business? Definitely through your personal profile. A lot of these groups won’t let you join as a business, so it needs to be through, a personal profile. That being said, you are able, let’s just go back here, to to, you know, tag a business.

So you can see here somebody said my husband and I are looking for an adviser, and then somebody was able to tag, somebody else, and you can also put a link to a Facebook page. So if you have Russell Investments or Samantha Russell Wealth Management Facebook page, they could link to it. Another tactic that’s really great is if you’re in a local group and you have a bunch of people in your office, have somebody else in the office tag you. Right?

So let’s say this person was said, I’m looking for an adviser going through a divorce, and, you know, I have questions.

And I don’t work with those kinds of clients, but Nancy in our office does. I could tag Nancy and say, hey, Nancy. Can you help? Or, Nancy, can you be of assistance?

This, a, provides social proof. Right? The person is like, oh, this other person is vouching for them. And then, b, it’s out of all of the people kinda self promoting, you’re getting somebody else to make that, you know, referral to you. So that’s a really, really good way to do it, to kinda stand out even more.

I just wanted to share this example. I just met Thomas Cook, this adviser, young adviser, at the Shift Advisor Conference last week down in Orlando, and he told me about something he’s doing with Facebook groups that I wanted to share with you because I think it’s so smart. So he is part of a group called, oh gosh, it’s called retiring to telco village, and it’s, I believe, in Tennessee, Memphis area. And people who are coming from all over to retire there, they specifically join this group, and then they ask a bunch of questions about where to live, about things to do.

Right? All kinds of questions. So he joined the group, and he is not, by any means, self promoting, but he does all kinds of things to tap into this group. Right?

So here’s a question somebody said, my husband and I are coming in these days to scope out the area. What are suggestions on fun places to see, things to do? And he talks about, oh, there’s this pickleball exhibition with these top players in the world. If you’re interested, it’s gonna be great.

And then a little while later, he posted a picture of this, exhibition match in that group because it turned out he actually was helped putting it on. So he put on this pickleball, event for this local group of people, who are retirees or pre retirees in the area. And then this is just a screenshot he had sent me of a comment he left on a page. Somebody was asking about moving to the area, and he just gave them a quick, you know, tip about making sure you update your estate planning documents to reflect that you live in Tennessee now.

And he said, this is the firm I recommend recommend. I don’t have any affiliation with them, but, oh, by the way, I’m teaching a free course on estate planning at the library if you wanna join. Right? So just adding tons and tons of value rather than just being purely self promotion.

Is this all making sense? I know this is the like, drinking from a fire hose, lots of info all at once, but, hopefully, this is helpful to you all. Let me know in the chat if you’re already doing this or if this is giving you some ideas of new things that you can do. Okay.

Thank you, Dominic and Brian. Alright. Where was I? Okay. So we went through those.

And just with the, with the Facebook group, I just wanted to point out where’s that other one?

Oh, when you go into filter over here, you know, you can see posts from, you know, just a day or two ago and also a really long time ago. So you’ll really be able to search in here and find posts through lots of different time periods.

Alright.

Now I promised a couple more practical tips.

So here is one. I wanna know how many of you know about this.

You know, so many advisers will tell me that they get more people following them on LinkedIn, but that doesn’t always translate to booked meetings or appointments.

Did you know that LinkedIn now has a feature for everybody where right under your name, you can add a call to action, like visit my website or book an appointment?

I’m gonna show you how to do that. It’s a relatively new feature. I haven’t seen that many advisers with it activated. Let me know in the chat if you have it on yours.

But let’s just pull this up.

Oops.

Okay.

So when you’re in LinkedIn we’ll go to my page.

Okay. Nathan has his up. Awesome. So you’re in your page, and you’re gonna click on your profile.

And right here under edit, you’re gonna click the little edit button, and you’re gonna scroll down. And at the very, very bottom here, you can see where it says custom button. So you’re gonna say edit custom button. So did everybody see where I was was at?

So you’re on your profile page. You click the little, pen for edit, and then you click edit custom button. And then you can decide how you wanna do it. So you wanna do it as a link, and you could say, okay.

I wanna direct people to my website. I wanna direct people to my calendar, my meeting scheduler, however you wanna set it up. And then once you’re done, it not only is gonna be, you know, underneath your name on your profile, but anytime you post something, it will be there as well.

So that is, something to pay attention to. Somebody is saying they don’t have the custom button showing. So maybe it’s only been rolled out for some people. So, again, you’re going into your profile page.

You’re clicking this little pen, and then you’re scrolling all the way to the bottom to custom button. It’s definitely not only for paid users because I don’t currently have the paid version of LinkedIn. So let me do some digging to find out why some people have it and some don’t. It would not be a compliance issue because compliance has no bearing on the features LinkedIn rolled out to you.

So we will see. So I guess not everybody has it yet.

Oh, it may only be for profiles that have opted into creator profile. Okay. There’s a tip. We can I will investigate this and get back to you all?

But while we’re in here, there’s a few other things I wanna show you. If you oh, and at least just put a helpful article in the chat on adding the creator button. So another thing to pay attention to, when you scroll down here, under the featured section this is another thing. Remember, if you’re going and you’re leaving those comments on other people’s posts with the idea that they’re gonna come back and land on your page, you want them to say, who is Samantha or who is Stacy or Dominic, you know, and and what are they all about? This featured section here is a great way to highlight some of your best content, your best, you know, maybe blog posts, your a call to action, a meeting schedule, or whatever you want. So what you’re gonna do if this is the little featured section.

You’re gonna come in here, and you can move around, like, toggle, you know, which one is being shown where. So I could take this and move it down. So I want this ten adviser websites nailing the home page to be first. You can reorder them.

You can also, in here, add new ones. So you can add a post. You can add a newsletter. You can just add a link.

So if I say add a post, it will pull up all of my most recent posts and allow me to feature it. So I click feature, and now it’s in my featured section.

So right. So now I can all of these posts are here that I want to feature. So I have a good mix of videos, stand alone posts, profile, you know, page articles.

Because remember, when somebody is just checking you out for the first time, they’re not gonna see all the content that you’ve been posting. They’re they’re you know, they can come down here to activity, but this featured section is really gonna show them stuff that maybe was from a year ago. Right? So you really wanna make sure you’re highlighting your best stuff right there in the featured section. If you don’t currently have the featured section activated, up here at the top, do you see where it says add profile section?

This is where you can go in, and you can add different things. So under recommended, you click add featured, and it’ll be right there for you.

Okay.

Great.

You guys are awesome. You have so many questions and helpful tips. You are all the best. And, yes, the webinar is being recorded.

I know. Again, we’re going through a lot. I wanna show you a couple more things, before we move on and get go through other questions. I just wanted to to share some people have talked about, do you have something, like, if we just wanna focus on one topic pretty heavily for the month, you know, can we do, like, a sequence of posts on that or things like that?

And, yes, you absolutely can.

In the content library, you will find that we have different what we call either email sequences or social sequences, and that is a series of posts that go out over a period of time, on a particular topic. So when you click on it, it will pull it up. It will tell you what it is, and then, you know, in this one, it’s saying four emails. Right?

In this one, it is it’s showing you how many posts. So here we go. Post one, post two, post three, post four, post five. So there’s a series of posts, and then that way, it’s all on a particular topic, but you can set it.

And you’ll know for the rest of the month, you’ve got these particular posts on this topic. So this is all available to you in your content library, which makes it, again, really easy to plan out that editorial calendar in advance.

Alright. So I also included, which we’re not gonna have time to get through today, but I also included in here, my five tips for making your LinkedIn page the best that it can be. So all about how to do a headshot and banner, how to write a great headline, all kinds of stuff. So you will get all of these slides afterwards, so I wanna make sure that you know where to find them. I just wanna give one more shout out to our do it for me program.

Again, you’re not only gonna get the calendar, you’re gonna get links to every single piece of content we’re gonna post on your behalf. We also give you a fun little marketing tip. So this month’s was how to surprise and delight the tax professionals and CPAs in your network.

There’s also additional emails, prospecting emails, all kinds of stuff that we can do on your behalf. So if you are interested, I am gonna put this QR code up here. You can scan it and reach out to our team, and we would love to help you with your marketing.

And, in the meantime, let’s go through and see what questions you all have.

Thank you all for being here. Again, I I know your time is valuable, and I really, really appreciate your being here with us. Okay.

Jeff is saying, should financial advisers limit connecting with other financial advisers, recruiting, etcetera? I’ve heard it can affect the algorithm.

I wouldn’t say you have to, stop doing that. I mean, certainly, I connect with tons of other marketers because I wanna see what other people are doing in marketing and learn from them. But but I will say you need to be intentional about interacting with those who are your target audience. So I’m very intentional about interacting with all of you. Right? I look all the time to help answer financial advisers’ questions or give them feedback.

Sometimes I’ll even just say, you know, that was a great social post, or this is fantastic content. More like this, please. So there it’s not that you have to limit one. It’s just you gotta add in the other.

It’s kind of the advice I give my kids. You know, we’re not cutting back. I try to tell them, it’s not like we’re cutting back on junk food. We’re adding in more veggies and fruits.

So just change change your mindset a little bit.

Okay.

Let’s see.

What was mistake number six? Paul missed it because his Internet gave out. Does anybody remember what mistake number six was? Let’s see, Paul, if anyone can help you. Oh, somebody already answered it. You’re not consistent. So it was all about consistency.

Somebody asked how many times per week or per month is consistent. I mean, this really depends. I used to say, you know, you need to post five times a week. I have since found that that is not true.

You need to leave the comments. The comments are way more important than how often you post as long as what you post is valuable. So, you know, you could post once a week, and that can be great, as long as you’re getting those comments in.

Alright. What is your opinion on using personal versus professional profiles, when joining and cultivating connections and niche groups? Does it really boil down to personal preferences?

I mean, I would just say that by far, you know, when it comes to social media, the more buttoned up and formal and professional you have to be, the harder it’s gonna be to really make those connections, say what you wanna say, all those things. So keep that in mind when you’re making those choices. And when it comes to your business page, use your, you know, individual pages to promote it as well because more people will definitely see that.

Okay.

Does okay. Not sure if this was answered. Does commenting on posts from our business profile provide the same return engagement interest as it does for personal pages?

Make sure you reply to it.

So we’re getting a lot of questions again just about I’m getting you know, most of the interaction I’m getting is from other people in the industry. How do I move away from that? The biggest way you move away from that is, you know, connect with more people who are, the people that you actually want to do business with. So if you’re trying to work with physicians, start connecting with more, you know, doctors and nurses and medical people and leaving comments. Join the groups they’re in.

That’s really gonna be the best way. If you’re sort of not proactive about it, so many people want to work with advisers that they will find you and they will be leaving comments on your posts, and then that’s what you’re gonna end up seeing is all of their content because that’s the way the algorithm works. So you really have to be, proactive. Someone asked where can we see a list of Facebook groups? So I don’t think there’s just one list, but if you come into Facebook here, you know, and you search an area Let’s just see. Like, if I search Cleveland moms. I’m from Cleveland, Ohio.

And we can see there’s all these different okay. The the Cleveland moms.

We can see different groups, Westside moms, and how many members are in there. I just put moms because mom groups is a big one. But, again, I’m a I belong to the Switzerland travel planning group.

I know there’s people that belong to different retirement planning groups. You can also ask around in your local area what Facebook groups do you belong to and and see what people tell you, and just try different searches in here. So if you’re looking for, you know, different retirement, I don’t know. What’s a what’s a big place? Let’s just say Orlando.

Any groups come up. Orlando and Florida. Places of things and interest group. Forty seven thousand members. Right? So definitely just by searching Facebook, you’re gonna find the best that’s gonna give you the best way.

Okay. I’m just gonna put this back up there.

Alright. So I know we’re pretty much almost out of time. We went so unbelievably fast, and I really didn’t get a chance to pull up your LinkedIn pages, which I’m so sorry. I guess we’re gonna have to do another session just on that. But, hopefully, even just what I went through today gave you a lot of really good ideas.

Please let us know in the chat if you found this helpful and what you would love most a follow-up session workshop on. What what would be most helpful to really do even deeper dive in that we didn’t get chance to talk to to talk about today? I would love to know.

And, again, I know I was speaking fast. I’m trying to get as much in here as we can, but we really hope you’ll connect with our team and learn about how we can help you up your social media game. It’s so nice to know that the financial content and the pieces that are gonna position you as an expert is taken care of and just let you do the commenting and the personal post, which is what FMG, really, really makes easy. So thank you so much, everyone, and enjoy the rest of your week.