Social media is a tool that can be utilized in different ways by a variety of departments within an organization. Particularly in the Financial Services industry, a company’s digital marketing department is often tasked with identifying a social media solution that will be used by the marketing team as well as by financial advisors. When assessing the best tool for a company to implement, it is important to recognize the distinct wants and needs of these two groups and from there, choose a tool that properly aligns with these wants and needs; these tools won’t always be an all-in-one platform.
Marketing
From the perspective of marketing, social media is used primarily to promote brands through the posting and sharing of content on brand pages as well as conversations with consumers via comments. Marketing professionals must protect their brand on social media while also properly engaging their target audiences through consistent brand messaging. Along with this comes the need to track metrics surrounding social media such as retweets, likes, follows, and shares of posts. In order to accomplish these goals, the marketing department usually decides to implement a social media management system.
Financial Advisors
A financial advisor (FA) is primarily interested in using social media to reach and communicate with new and existing clients, therefore they have a very different set of wants and needs. First and foremost, a FA wants access to relevant content through a system that is easy to use and doesn’t require a change in behavior. Complex metric and reporting capabilities surrounding their social media posts aren’t a priority and the systems that include these types of capabilities often cause adoption challenges for the advisors. The compliance and legal requirements surrounding the use of social media is always a concern, so the ability to satisfy compliance and legal through transparent monitoring of FA social media channels is ideal.
When going through the process of assessing and selecting a tool, it is a common misconception that one tool needs to satisfy the wants and needs of both departments. A social media management system is essential for the members of a marketing team in order to track metrics, analytics, and scale their communications to company social networks. Financial advisors on the other hand have no need to track the metrics and performance of their social media posts, but rather they are concerned with not having to learn a new technology and engaging with customers via relevant content.
These two groups have different wants and needs, so it would not make sense to have financial advisors adopt a social media management system just because the marketing department needs one. In addition, social media management systems have a much higher price point than monitoring and archiving solutions, so it also makes sense financially to only have the marketing department use this type of complex tool. A monitoring and archiving tool has the ability to run transparently which will allow financial advisors to post via their social networks like normal, but still ensure they are upholding the company and brand reputation. In order to efficiently fulfill the wants and needs of both the marketing department and financial advisors, companies will be most successful by using a hybrid of both tools. Marketing and financial advisors work as counterparts when it comes to distributing compliant content, so it is important to allow your company to utilize tools that also act as counterparts.
If you would like more information on how an archiving and monitoring tool satisfies the wants and need of financial advisors, take a look at the keys to regulatory compliance as defined by FINRA.