Advisors soliciting clients through social media may be going about it all wrong. To use social media effectively, use it as a tool to tell clients all about yourself, says advisor Cathy Curtis of Curtis Financial Planning.
Curtis, whose focus in her San Francisco-based practice is on female clients, spoke this week at a social media panel at TD Ameritrade's conference in Orlando. To find her ideal clients and to help them find her, Curtis says, her first step is to build a strong web site and a blog.
Then she uses social media to drive traffic to her web site and blog. On LinkedIn, Curtis says, she makes sure she spends a lot of time building out her profile in great detail. She doesn't use LinkedIn to ask clients to hire her. Rather, she lets them get to know her, down to her volunteer work and her interest in fine food. Her social media profile on all the social media sites she uses should "have personal appeal," she says. "I want [the profiles] to stand out. I want to be transparent personally and professionally."
It has definitely worked, Curtis says, pointing to a recent example of an affluent female client who contacted her and hired her fairly rapidly simply because she found some of the personal details about Curtis on her LinkedIn profile so appealing. "She loved that I was volunteering for the Commonwealth Club," a San Francisco public affairs forum, Curtis says.
One point advisors should keep in mind, Curtis adds, is that once they've started using social media, it's important to keep using them regularly and to update them consistently. "You can't just start and stop," she says.
A fairly new platform that she'll be adding this year is Pinterest, an online pin board that is "purely visual," she says. It's an easy way for users to share things they really like or are interested in, she adds, noting that the platform seems to have a lot of potential to grow.
