5 Tips for Effective Social Media Strategy via #SoulcialMe

Social media was once an “experimental communication tool used by a few forward‐thinking firms” in our industry. Now, on nearly every financial firm’s website you’ll find a trio of little blue boxes somewhere near the bottom. Corporate Insight, a research firm that provides competitive intelligence to financial institutions, released on Thursday a report spotlighting how financial firms have taken that growth and turned it into effective social media strategies.

“Over the past few years, the use of social media by financial services firms has increased exponentially,” Alan Maginn, senior analyst and social media expert at Corporate Insight, said in a statement. “Social media is a critical way for companies to communicate with their clients, prospects and other targeted audiences on a personal level.”

The report examines 90 financial services firms and ranks their Facebook pages, Twitter profiles, proprietary communities and blogs. While most firms that commit to a social media strategy will utilize the Big Three—Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn—Corporate Insight excluded LinkedIn from its report, as well as Google and YouTube.

While LinkedIn has an extraordinary membership (150 million members worldwide), Corporate Insight notes that “there’s very little variance between one firm’s LinkedIn presence and the next.” Furthermore, most interactions are private, making engagement exceedingly difficult to measure accurately. YouTube offers better metrics by which to measure engagement, but the report found engagement tends to be low. The commenting feature is rarely used by fans of financial services channels, and in fact, is often disabled by the firms. Since Google allowed firms to create business pages in November 2011, roughly 50% of the firms tracked by Corporate Insight established a business page in their name. However, they appear to have done little more than that. “Until more firms have the chance to establish functioning accounts on this new community, we feel it is premature to grade their efforts,” the report says.

Corporate Insight based its analysis of firms’ social media accounts on audience, content and engagement, but is especially focused on engagement.

via advisorone.com