Social Media Best Practices—Transcript

I’m Larry Graham, vice-president, business development, and lead instructor with LePhair Associates.

What are some best practices a broker should keep in mind on social media?

Instagram, Facebook and Twitter—whatever social medium is being used—it really is not going to be anything other than complimentary to other forms of communication that are longer standing, such as phone calls and emails. You want make sure that it’s progressive and innovative, and demonstrates your uniqueness.

So really a combination of social media, keeping in mind the needs and the interests of the audience—that would be the best way to reach them. So what is of interest to them should always be top of mind and a key theme—what’s in it for them.

Being proactive as well in terms of social media, so mapping out multiple messages and multiple themes over a period of time, as opposed to one-offs, is a better way of making sure it’s a best practice in keeping in touch with clients and prospects.

There’s also the idea of push-versus-pull marketing, so notionally, you’d like to leave your prospects and clients wanting more from you than you’ve given. In other words, they’d like to hear more and they look forward to the next engagement with you. You like them to come to you as a result of your efforts, as opposed to them perceiving that you’re pushing something on them.

If you’re trying to build relationships—which does take time, consistency and relevant information, as well as follow up and an overarching strategy—then the loop could be ‘devise some great content with the needs and interests of your target audience in mind’, and that would hopefully create conversations.

Those creations in this continuous loop would also lead to hopefully to relationships that you would build with them over time, based on trust, based on content, based on innovation. And those relationships in turn would lead to revenues and longer-lifetime relationship with clients and/or expanding your footprint, if you will, in the support you can provide to your customers.

Mistakes that brokers and producers and principals of brokerages should consider avoiding are:

• posting social media posts for the sake of posting,
• and not having an overarching social media strategy to engage and have conversations and build relationships with.
• not having follow-up: so, posting something without referring to it in advance or referring to it after your post.

If a broker were to only choose one social network, that really depends on the target audience that that brokerage is trying to appeal to. The most perceived-professional social media tool would be LinkedIn, and that’s also a tool to generate more leads—it’s known as that—whereas the other social media tools really are not known for generating leads. Think about a combination of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Dynamics 365, Office 365—they’ve integrated a company’s social network, if you will, and sales data for the first time.

Even if you think about it, from a free LinkedIn account, you can use various tips to generate sales, so optimizing your own profile in sales. Create a profile that demonstrates how you and your brokerage add value today, as opposed to what your brokerage does. What is in it for them—the client or prospect—to choose you and your brokerage.

Whether it is LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook, Twitter, you want to be able to start relationships and build on those relationships based on social media.

This story was originally published by Canadian Insurance Top Broker.