As the most visited social media site in the world, Facebook doesn’t need an introduction. Facebook has become a name with most adults using, sharing, engaging and even shopping with brands on Facebook each and every day.
From an outside- in perspective, the financial services industry is pretty poor at using facebook to engage and interact with their audiences. Communication is very one dimensional with few conversations ignited between the firm, their customers and conversations between both existing and external consumers.
The first stage of the process is to write down some business goals that you want to achieve from social media.
•Increase brand awareness?
•Improve Customer communication?
• Issue Product Information?
•Showcase Your brand’s personality?
•Generate 2 way conversations?
•Generate Direct Sales & Leads?
•Encourage Brand Loyalty
•Generate Website Traffic?
•Become a source of information?
If financial services firms are to use facebook and other social media channels well, they need to move away from a broadcast approach (bowling) which is prevalent across many channels. Social media should take a pinball approach where communication jumps between consumers and companies seamlessly.
Firms need to understand the personality of their brand and let it shine through social channels. Karl Jung’s 12 brand archetypes could help you to find yours. It’s worth thinking about how we usually interact with our friends and family and apply it in a digital context using a variety of content formats. We try to entertain, inform and provide assurance and stability. The same applies to facebook, it is a social channel afterall.
Taking a look outside the industry we can see how brands such as innocent smoothies use humor to gain attention, drive interactions and reach new audiences. Monday’s are boring, entertain your audiences.
The final stage is to measure engagement, reach and interactions. There are insight tools built into facebook business pages that allow you to view this easily. Are your campaigns working? If not what are you going to do to shift the direction of your strategy?
The frequency of posting isn’t as important as keeping consistent patterns. If you are going to post every day, what resources do you have to create and share engaging content with your followers? Less frequent but higher quality content could be a stronger alternative.
The attached webinar focuses on the techniques and strategies that could help adviser firms use facebook in a smarter way.
Sources For Webinar Content:
Innocent Smoothies, Smart insights, Hollendsen (2019) Global Marketing Management.
