It ’s always hard to follow that video, it’s got amazing energy and a lot of mind boggling facts. 100 minutes of video was uploaded during the time we atched that. 78% of consumers trust peer reccomendations We will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media. AND most importantly: Social media isnt a fad – it ’s a fundamental change in the way we communicate. This is such an important message for us to take away today. Thankyou to Des for this mornings session, lets leap straight into this one. Now we are going to look at the nuts and bolts of three of the main social media platforms that you can use to build a social network around your financial planning business.
It ’s always hard to follow that video, it’s got amazing energy and a lot of mind boggling facts. 100 minutes of video was uploaded during the time we atched that. 78% of consumers trust peer reccomendations We will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media. AND most importantly: Social media isnt a fad – it ’s a fundamental change in the way we communicate. This is such an important message for us to take away today. Thankyou to Des for this mornings session, lets leap straight into this one. Now we are going to look at the nuts and bolts of three of the main social media platforms that you can use to build a social network around your financial planning business.
Thankyou, welcome to Des, and a little bit about me, my role at AMP, and why I think social media is so important.
There are loads of social networks… Today we are going to talk about three core social media platforms, Im going to explain how each one works and hopefully alleviate any fear that you might have around these. If you have questions save them u to till the end, as we’ll have a panel discussion session where youll get a chance to bounce all the questions off us. The first we will look at is LinkedIn. This is your personal billboard or poster for yourself online. The place you can sell the professional you. Facebook – Dinner party - we will take a look at some facebook business pages and the difference between your personal page and the business page. And lastly Twitter – the cocktail party - the final frontier in social media for a lot of people. This is a fantastic tool to build relationships and really importantly to LISTEN to what is happening in your professional space. Lastly I’ll show you a few tips and traps!!
Three important things to remember as we go through this…………………….. personal vs business accounts. Time commitment – dog for christmas dog for life? This is all about content sharing, not necessarily CREATING. You can share things your audience might find interesting. It ’s about building relationships and having a real human engaging experience. ALL ABOUT CONTENT.
First up lets talk about Linked in. Linked in can be likened to your own personal billboard on the internet. It’s got your CV, your professional qualifications, your work experience, your accreditation, recommendations from previous employers and customers. This is the place to sell yourself to the world – and its all about you. Origins as a business networking tool, and has evolved to become more social over time.
Two million users, which is huge in Australia for platform which is mostly about business connections. How many people have a linked in profile?
Signing up has never been easier! When you navigate to the sign up page, you need to fill out 4 simple fields to get started. IN FACT, you don’ t even need to sign up these days, you simply use your facebook login details and Linked in will create a profile for you.
Once you’ve logged in you will land here, the Home page. We will examine first four tabs today, Home, Profile, Contacts and Groups. These are the most important things to master in linked in. So the home screen: Here you will see LinkedIn is telling me few people I might know here in the right side, these reccomendations are all coming based on your work history, education, etc that you complete in your profile. You can see I can share an update, if I had something to say. I can see some news that Linked In thinks might interest me, and of course the main feed at the bottom where you can see what others are saying.
The next tab along is the profile page, and here you can see my profile. one of the most important things to remember in linked in is to ensure that your profile is complete there are a range of tips and tricks that linked in gives you when you are in the edit screen, to help you get to 100% completeness. You can also have recommendations from previous clients or employers on this page. This is really important if you can obtain some, recommendations by others validate what you have said about yourself.
A great profile of a Hillross adviser I found via linked in. It ’ s complete and professional. If we were able to scroll down we would see Debrorahs education and other connections. And also her accreditations and group members. You can even see here how we are connected? Eg, how many degrees of separation we are away from each other. This gives more klout to your connections, eg Oh Emily knows Deborah. Remember in the video, 78% of consumers trust a peer recommendation. This is why connections are so important in Linked in.
One of the most important things in Linked in is to make contacts and increase your network of people you have done business with. Other financial advisers, members of the Hillross management team, your clients and customers. There are a number of ways you can do that – via email, via address book search, and I find – one of the most effective ways, by looking at the the “people you may know tab” . I know almost every one of those people! So the search engine here is quite clever!
The last tab we are going to look at this Groups – I cant emphasise how important it is to align yourself to groups which match your profession. You can see that straight away in the suggested groups it is showing me the NSW Financial Planning Network. As you navigate around linked in, you will see what groups your colleagues and customers are members of, it is a great idea to join similar groups as this will be your gateway to networking events, potentially new clients, lots of really interesting stuff there.
The final thing to touch on is basic accounts vs premium accounts. There are a range of benefits with premium accounts and you really need to make your own choice about whether or not to upgrade. If you think that advanced search and other organisational features will help you – then I say go for it!
Direct connections have lots of klout! Complete your profile to provide max information about you. Get recommendations! If I was looking for a financial adviser on Linked In I would be looking for one with lots of connections, a complete professional photo, and one with recommendations from other customers. Remember! 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations!
Lets move on! Next up is FACEBOOK! Facebook I want everyone to think of as a dinner party, where engaging in conversation is important, its good to say poignant things, to appear intelligent and wise, and you want to be liked. You don’ t want to talk too much – because people will get annoyed and wont invite you back again, and you don ’ t want to sit silent or the same fate you will suffer!
There are over 10 million australias on Facebook these days! 800 million worldwide! That is over 50% of the population and this is the primary way in which Gen Y are communicating today outside of SMS. It is absolutely impossible to ignore it or brush it off as a fad! Facebook was first conceived in 2004!!!!! That is 8 years ago. This is not NEW! And its constantly changing and adapting the meet the demands of its users.
Yep – half the population of Facebook is 18-25. BUT do not discount the mums and dads! As the video at the start said, the fastest growing segment on facebook is the grocery buying 55-65 year old females. They are up to all sorts of things on Facebook, I know because my mum is one of them!! This demographic are becoming super social media savvy.
My profile, the new timeline, you can customise this as you wish.
But we arent here to look at personal profiles,we are interested purely in Business pages. This is were you can create a professional, business identity on facebook, separate to your personal account, that you can use to engage with and connect to your customer base. It ’s SUPER easy to set up a business page. Just visit this ‘facebook pages’ area, you can find it via search or google and click ‘create page’ up in the top right corner.
I thought I ’d show you a business page which is not a financial planner, but rather a personal trainer that I know. It’s not diferrent to how your page would be, so lets have a look around a basic business page.
Well you all aren ’ t Personal trainers, so here is a Hillross facebook page that is looking pretty good – got some nice interesting content. Clean and tidy. Information looking nice and complete on the left, and on the right the feed, again content here is nothing new, just relevant and shared.
There are some AMAZING analytics tools built right into Facebook that you can capitalise on to help you understand the value of your investment in this platform. Im showing amplify ’ s analytics here.
So what kind of content should I share? CONTENT IS KEY. Interesting news items about money management, banks, interest rates. Updates about your practice, events, new staff, - HUMAM storys. Tips about financial stuff. Maybe things from the AMP PR machine, shane oliver videos etc. Factual information from credible sources. NO ADVICE.
So what kind of content should I share? CONTENT IS KEY. Interesting news items about money management, banks, interest rates. Updates about your practice, events, new staff, - HUMAM storys. Tips about financial stuff. Maybe things from the AMP PR machine, shane oliver videos etc. Factual information from credible sources. NO ADVICE.
Twitter! There is lots going on, and it’s very high energy. Many conversations are happening at once and everyone is talking about different things. People drop in and out of conversations, you can join any conversation you like. Everything is quite public.
There are 1.8million users in Australia. 300 million users worldwide. Over 50 million tweets sent per day – 1 billion per week.
With SO much noise, the best thing to do in twitter at first is listen! When you first sing up to the party, you will aready know a few people. So start following them, then listen to some hashtags (will discuss in a moment, and start to follow those users).
Everything in 140 characters! Theres a new saying in business, if you can ’t say it in 140 chs you probably shouldn’t be saying it! This style of writing can be hard to adjust to, but its critical. With this new notion of the “attention economy”, were our attention has a value, we must be able to catch the attention of the reader in 140 characters or less. Lets take a tour of the home screen. Point out that Trends are hot topics.
To the screen. Definition: The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages. Hashtags: Helping you find interesting Tweets People use the hashtag symbol # before relevant keywords in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets to show more easily in Twitter Search Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets in that category Hashtags can occur anywhere in the Tweet Hashtagged words that become very popular are often Trending Topics
The @ Symbol is simply tagging a person in a tweet. You could tag Hillross_au, you could tag Hugh Humphrey, or you could tag me. Its just alerting the person that they have been mentiond in a tweet.
Have you ever received an email from someone you want to forward to all your friends? This is retweet in twitter. There is retweet button on every tweet, and it basically just reshares a post out to your followers that you found interesting. You can add some text to it if there is enough characters. Increase your profile Share insights/spread good content Increase goodwill with your followers.,
Tweet about relevant stuff! This tweet from Barack, about fatherhood, personal, hashtag. Use hashtags.
Get your followers up by following. Listen via hashtags And retweet!
All of the sites we ’ ve talked about today come with mobile apps for all devices. This is the big KEY to getting involved in social media, because you don ’ t need to be tied to your PC to do it. You can do it on the train, in a cab, at the airport. I even think with Siri now you can talk to your phone and she will do tweet for you! A lot of the execs at AMP find the time for this stuff, purely because they are able to access it when they do not have their pc open, via a mobile device, anywhere, anytime. The future of these platforms is MOBILE, as the video said, 50% of mobile internet traffic in the UK is to Facebook. These social media sites get this, and they spend a lot of money making their mobile apps work really well. They are all FREE.
Tweet deck. From this desktop application you can run all your social media feeds in one location. A great easy way to monitor your feeds at a glance, and even to update them all at the same time. I really encourage you to test drive these tools as it makes managing your social media life a lot easier from a single console.
Look for life events on these platforms, there is a myriad of information available about your clients here! Life events which might trigger the need for financial planning! Marriages, graduations, cruise ships sinking, divorces!
Three things to take away today. Im going to leave you with a video which has nothing to do with social media. BUT I want you to watch this real life community in action and think about how it might apply to the digital flocks online. Just like the QantasLuxury stuff, the first time I saw this it really resonated with me about human behaviour online and how its replicated in nature, content is exchanged, there is electricity and movement. thanks for listening today! And I ’ll be looking forward to taking any questions in the panel discussion shortly.