Social Media full of potential clients

Social media is the steering wheel that allows financial advisors to drive traffic in the opposite direction to the National Do Not Call List.

The 140-character tweets need not tell the entire story, but they need to generate enough interest for potential clients to ask for more, said Hamid Electriciteh of 247iPro Inc, at the 2011 Toronto Fall Summit organized by the Independent Financial Brokers of Canada (IFB).

“Traditional tools of marketing – newspapers, radio, and television – are one-sided advertising, unidirectional communication; you send a message out and they read it, but lately they don’t,” he said. “Most sales and marketing organizations and distributors are facing the same challenge.”

The most important part of the social media communication is that it has to be objective and free of marketing influence. “No sales pitch.”

Electriciteh said there are, however, ways to “put a twist in it” and use this communication as “social media marketing” and make it a sales pitch.

The true value of social media to distributors is the fact that they can communicate with hundreds if not thousands of people at the same time. “What we want to do is use social media to connect to millions of people in its network.”

There are ways to promote TFSAs and GMWBs in 140 characters – the standard message length allowed on Twitter – without it sounding like product promotion, he added.

The first step is to set up a social media account. “Have both personal and corporate accounts, it doesn’t cost you anything.”

Second, create a profile that is appealing, transparent, and genuine, “because people can [run a] Google [search on] you and find out if you lie to them and you lose credibility altogether.”

In the case of microblogging site Twitter, said Electriciteh, advisors should try and connect with centers of influence, people with large following. “You’ve got to make sure you follow people who have a massive [number of] people within their network.”

A joke at the expense of Kim Kardashian can sure make a serious point about how one person in a place of prominence can influence millions of people in their network. “Whatever she says is good, is good, even after a $17-million divorce, after 17 hours of [getting married],” he said. “Like it or not, that’s how it is.”

Next step, find an interesting topic and start a discussion. “You can’t solicit and you only have 140 characters, [but] if you can’t have a discussion going back and forth, then you have a problem; you have got to pick a topic that people are interested in.”

And that has to be more relevant to an advisor’s business than are marital muck ups of mercurial celebrities. For Electriciteh it is TFSAs and he has found an engaging way to promote TFSAs on Twitter using a little teaser. “Tax-free income guaranteed for life, who would like to have one of those? That’s the message that should be going out there.”

One way to draw prospects closer yet is placing a website address or a link to a landing page within the tweet, or a post on Twitter. A landing page is the page website visitors arrive at after clicking on a link.

This is the place where advisors can engage in further product promotion or “collect information from the people who come there to know more of what you’re talking about.”

“And that’s how you build a list of people [potential clients] who may be interested in your product [and services]; you can use the same technique to build a list from Facebook and YouTube.”

“It’s this list of prospects where the money is,” added Electriciteh.