When it comes to making a splash on social media, financial advisors have plenty of platforms to choose from, even as they have mere moments to capture the attention of a prospective client scrolling by.
And while places like Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook fuel big engagement wins for wealth managers, a certain blue bird is becoming a great place to broadcast, but not the best place to interact.
Hearsay Systems released its
The company, which develops digital communication tools for firms, examined more than 16.3 million published social media posts that collectively garnered more than 22.3 million engagements across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.
Now in its sixth year, leaders of the
So as an advisor, knowing how to maximize your minutes on social media is a topic that should regularly be revisited.
Planners seem to be getting that point. Hearsay's latest research finds that advisors posted 55% more original content than the year before, and saw higher overall engagement as a result.
"That tells me a couple of things. One, they're much more comfortable sharing themselves and sharing their expertise. And just knowing what they can and can't say," Leach said. "The other thing it tells me is that those program administrators are also more confident in the compliance tools that they have and the supervision that they're able to provide."
Leach added that technology has improved in a way that gives program administrators faith in their ability to supervise how members of their organization conduct themselves online and become more comfortable with allowing the advisors to create original content.
"With those things working together, we just saw this huge leap in that confidence across the board," Leach said.
One standout finding of the research is a 23% increase in overall engagement across all channels, content types and lines of business from 2020 to today. Hearsay also found that original content connected best with social contacts, generating engagement rates that were nearly eight times higher on average.
In terms of social channels, LinkedIn and Facebook held steady as the most actively used networks, hosting nearly 91% of all posts in 2022. Those totals broke down to 51% and 40%, respectively.
Instagram, meanwhile, proved to be the most engaging platform. Average engagement rates were 1.6 on Instagram, 0.6 on LinkedIn and 0.4 on Facebook.
Bringing up the rear was Twitter, which produced the lowest engagement rates across industries. Its highest engagement rates ranged from 0.1 for P&C Insurance (text-only posts) to 1.5 for Asset Management (image posts).
Engagement rates measure the percentage of people who interact with content after seeing it. The rate is determined by dividing the total number of engagements per post by the reach per post, then multiplying the result by 100.
"No surprises as far as how the networks performed, and the nature of Twitter is more broadcast-oriented," Leach said. "It's not as much of an engagement setup as other networksI'd say the biggest surprise was the 23% increase in overall engagement. That's huge. We're used to seeing single digit increases as the industry slowly gets better."
For financial advisor Kevin J. Brady,
Brady said he prioritizes Twitter and LinkedIn to drive awareness of what he does as an advisor. But that doesn't mean he expects it to directly lead to new clients.
"Social media is a long game that certainly can help advisors with organic growth, but it takes time, consistency, and a thought-out process. Candidly, I am still working on that process myself but I know others have had measurable success, particularly on Twitter," Brady told Financial Planning in an email.
He added that something that has changed or become more pronounced over the last couple of years is that attention spans have decreased.
"This has been going on for years, to be fair, so it is not just a recent change. People on social media platforms increasingly are not going to leave that platform to read your blog, visit your website, watch your video, etc," he said. "There are probably many reasons but the influence of Instagram, TikTok and similar platforms are certainly part of it."
Brady sees great value in "zero-click" content. Rather than linking to a blog, a summary of the main key points in a LinkedIn post or Twitter thread may do the trick.
"It is not easy, doing this takes time," Brady said. "But for those who do it well, it is increasingly time well spent."
Focusing specifically on wealth management, the Hearsay study found that amid market volatility, wealth management firms drove high engagement by doubling down on financial education and news to position their firms and advisors as trusted experts.
Financial education, which includes the sub-categories of life events and retirement, was the most published and suggested type of content.
"Advisors are honing in on strategies to help baby boomers strategically liquidate wealth and guide GenXers on how to develop strong savings and investment plans," said the study.
News, which saw a 10% increase in publish rates from last year, was led by market insights as having the highest publish rate. Corporate brand content was the second most suggested category, but it was both less suggested and less published compared to the previous year.
Principles-based content drove the highest engagement rates in wealth management despite being suggested only 4% of the time and published 1% of the time.
"However, the suggest rate for principles-based content increased by 1% from last year, indicating some positive direction in providing this high-engaging content to teams," the study said.
Looking at the best practices for social selling, Hearsay finds that having a regular publishing cadence and social reciprocity matters. It's also worth keeping in mind the "ingredients" of your post such as links, images, videos or text.
Across all lines of business, links were by far the most used, followed by images, video and text. Links were shared at twice the rate of images, and 11 times the rate of videos, even though they had the lowest average engagement rate.
Text-only posts drove the highest engagement across all lines of business, coming in six times higher than images and 5.5 times more than videos. In particular, LinkedIn text-only posts garnered the highest engagement rates for all lines of business.
Leach said in many ways, this current environment of social media confidence and engagement is an unexpected evolution whose catalyst was the pandemic.
"We did what we had to do, and now we're just much more fluid between online and offline channels. At first it was sort of forced and uncomfortable. And then now we've kind of seen some of the benefits of it, as far as efficiency and convenience and some of those things," Leach said. Maybe two or three years ago … it was trying to coach advisors on how to share a little bit more of yourself and how to be authentic. That was really a stretch. And that was a big struggle.
"But they had just moved so far beyond that. And are looking for more ways to do it. How can we introduce more?"
On the topic of AI and the impact it may have on social media efforts in the future, Leach said she saw a number of interesting ways to leverage it.
She pointed to AI as helping to quickly scan or scrutinize shared information, and to AI tools making video creation simpler and more uniform for those with little editing experience.
"I think another really interesting area is just on content creation. That's, of course, all the rage … but some of the exciting uses that we see and that we've recently put in place are around content recommendations," Leach said. "So using AI to help look at how an individual advisor's content performs with their audience. Looking at all of these different angles and making recommendations for the most engaging content to share."
