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Hello my name is Bart Wisnowski. I’m the CEO of Advisor Websites, thanks for joining
me today. What we’re going to do is we’re going to spend a little bit of time talking
about social media today and how you can potentially utilise social media in your practice as a
financial advisor.
Now, before we get started, I know that social media can sometimes be overwhelming to sort
of take on, there are so many websites out there: twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube
– it could be tough to know where to start. So what I want to do today is focus on one
tool specifically that I would personally use if I was a financial advisor, and share
with you some of the experiences I’ve actually personally had using LinkedIn and hopefully
you can get some value out of that.
Before we get started, I’d like to quickly preface our demonstration today about social
media. Personally, I like to think about social media in the whole concept of I know a guy
who knows a guy, my personal feeling is that most social media networks work in this way.
(…) We’ve all had that experience where “I know a guy who seems to know everybody
– I know a guy who knows a mechanic, I know a guy who knows a good doctor, I know a guy
who knows where to get a great steak”, for example.
The beauty about social media is that it sort of follows that concept. Essentially what
happens is you end up being connected with a number of individuals that you might know.
Now, each one of those individuals might be connected to other individuals themselves,
and what happens with social media is that it’s a fantastic tool because it actually
physically maps it out for you – it gives you a little bit of a roadmap in terms of
who the people you’re connected with are connected to as well, and I think this is
where the power of social media really comes into play.
Now, again, personally when I first started using social media I found it overwhelming
so what I thought I would do is start off today by saying If I was to become a financial
advisor today, and I could only use one tool, the tool I would start off with is LinkedIn.
Here’s the reason why. I did some digging, the average age of the linked in user is 41
years old, the household income is 110k, college educated 95%, decision makers – 50% of all
LinkedIn users tend to be a decision maker on one subject or another. That’s great
because these are the people who might have the power to make decisions on items like
a group benefits packages for an organization, so definitely the type of people you want
to be in touch with. About 24% of the individuals using LinkedIn have a portfolio value of more
than a quarter million dollars.
Again, only my personal opinion, if I was to use only one social media network to get
started with, I would personally use LinkedIn and it’s because of these demographics that
I was able to find, but other social media networks are also great and we’ll cover
those in subsequent segments.
Let’s get started, what I’ll do is give you a really quick tour of LinkedIn; so what
happens when you’re logged into LinkedIn – the first thing you’ll see is your dashboard
– the dashboard is great because it gives you a very high level overview of what’s
happening with all of your connections. You can think of your connections as friends,
people you know, and the kind of things they’re doing in their world. On the home page it
gives you a very quick overview of what’s happening with everybody and who’s being
active.
The first real section I want to talk about is the profile section – now I personally
think that this section is extremely important, and I like to think of the profile section
as your online resume. It’ll list things like your existing positions, where you worked
in the past, where you went to school, who you’re connected with, and your websites.
This is great because you can actually spell out the name of your website; it has some
search engine benefits, you can list your blog, other social media profiles, which is
great.
If you continue to scroll down, you can put more details on your experience, how long
you’ve been at various roles, where you went to school and recommendations.
Personally, my target market is financial advisors, so my goal is to show anybody I’m
connected with that other financial advisors had great experiences with me when they built
their website and recommendations are a great way of doing that.
A quick observation from my end, if you’re a financial advisor in the US, I don’t believe
you’re allowed to use recommendations, but if you’re a financial advisor in Canada,
I do believe you’re allowed to use recommendations in your LinkedIn profile as a general rule,
but please check with your specific compliance department on that rule as well. So, just
a little note on that.
If you continue down further, again it’ll give you a little more info about interests
you may have, groups, activities, and associations you’re involved with, and it just gives
somebody that may checking you out or doing research on you before they do business with
you, sort of an insight and overview of your accomplishments over the years.
So the profile page i think of as it’s my online resume, I really want to have it filled
out – the great thing about linked in is as you complete your profile is it gives u
this little bar and your goal is to get up to 100% profile completeness, pretty easy
to do – take a little bit of time and probably the first thing I would do if I was creating
a brand new account or if you want to clean up your account a little.