7 Key Components for Every Advisors Social Media Plan
1. Your Starting Point
If youre like many advisors, you probably have a LinkedIn profile. Thats a good place to start. How complete is your profile? How many connections do you have? How many groups do you belong to?
Its all right if you dont have any of the above. Right now you are just establishing a baseline.
2. Scout Your Competitors
Notice their profiles. Are they complete? Visually appealing? Check out how many connections they have. Just a few? Many? When was the last time new content was added? Ask your self If I were a client of this advisor, would I connect with this profile?
3. Define Your Goals and Objectives
For most advisors, a good set of goals starts with identifying the social media platforms in which your clients participate. (You may want to start capturing this info in your CRM system). Follow that up with a goal of establishing yourself on those platforms. Finally, set a goal of connecting to 100% of your clients who are active in social media with your social media.
4. Build Your Team
For example, getting your profiles created will require data gathering, compliance approval, and posting. Who gathers the data? Who submits to compliance and follows up on any changes? Who does the actual data posting to the profile?
On an ongoing basis, success in social media requires content. Content creating, sourcing, approval, and posting can be a full time job. Make sure you know who owns it before you go live.
5. Develop and Maintain a Content Calendar
The best way to manage this is to create a content calendar. A content calendar is a timeline that lays out your content subject matter week-by-week ahead of time. It eliminates the Oh boy, its Wednesday and I have to come up with a blog post syndrome. You can use it to list topics, decide format (blog post? Facebook update?), and assign responsibility.
6. Round Up Some Partners
There is no shortage of people vying for your attention -- wholesalers, conferences, custodians -- so why not put them to work? Who offers web-ready content that you can post on your website? How about a portfolio manager who will do a phone interview you can turn into a podcast? Or a white paper you can offer your followers? Start asking around. You never know what you might find.
7. Establish and Maintain Meaningful Performance Reporting Data
Most social media platforms come with some basic analytics. If youre hosting a blog on your website, make sure to install Google analytics for tracking. There are also a variety of tools -- some free, some paid -- that can help aggregate all this data into a dashboard (Hootsuite is one example).
Even is you have to use a spreadsheet, its worth the effort to know how you are doing.