How RIAs Can Use Social Media to Build Trust and Attract Clients

 

Social media is misunderstood by financial advisors.

Many firms are hesitant to use social media due to marketing regulations. However, most of these concerns can be managed with the right disclaimers, which can be mitigated by working alongside your Compliance Officer. Besides, most regulations focus on the presentation of investment performance, which is not how you should be looking to attract clients anyway.

In reality, your firm’s brand (and your key personnel) are more compelling than performance metrics. Social media can highlight these to build trust and attract potential clients.

Let’s explore how to leverage social media to build trust with your key stakeholders.

 

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Why don’t RIAs use social media more?

 

RIAs are hesitant to use social media.

The main reason is the SEC marketing rule, which regulates communication with investors. This is a valid concern. However, navigating these rules can be managed with the correct protections and disclaimers, which your Compliance Officer or external counsel can guide you on. Most SEC regulations focus on discussing investment performance, which is not the main reason investors choose firms anyway.

In reality, performance is not the main factor that attracts clients to your firm. Building trust by sharing educational and valuable insights is more effective for growing your client base.

Recognizing this opportunity opens the door to a powerful tool that accelerates the time it takes to build trust with clients.

 

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What benefits does it give you?

Social media is a powerful outreach tool that helps you build brand awareness and relationships with key stakeholders.

Social media is like a 24/7 virtual conference. It allows you to meet people where they already are. Many potential stakeholders regularly check their LinkedIn feed even if they don’t post often.

Successfully leveraging LinkedIn also drives considerable traffic to your website. This is a crucial part of the discovery process. Once prospects feel comfortable with you, they’re more likely to agree to a meeting, which increases the chances of converting them into clients.

Social media also makes it easy for others to share your insights. Your followers can forward your posts to other interested parties without much hassle. Simply having followers forward your posts can turn the platform into a referral network, which reduces friction for new stakeholders to begin conversations with you.

 

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Where do you start?

You must address a few things before you post anything on social media.

First, you must optimize both your individual and company profiles. For RIAs, LinkedIn should be your main focus as this is where you will most likely find your core audience.

Put yourself in a prospect’s shoes. Ask yourself: how does it look to you? Would you trust this person if this was your first impression?

Pictures and banners should be professional with high-resolution imaging to signal credibility. Headlines and summaries must be strong, concise, and most importantly, directed at building trust with your ideal prospect.

Only once your profile looks pristine should you consider sharing your insights.

Importantly, you should leverage your personal page as much as, if not more than, your company page. People connect more easily with other people than with companies. It’s not a coincidence that Elon Musk has more followers than X’s official account.

Now you can start to build a following around a brand that builds trust and engagement.

 

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How do you implement a good social media campaign?

Your social media posts should revolve around campaigns. A social media campaign is a series of engaging posts based on a particular insight, event, or theme that captures attention and delivers key messages in a time-efficient way.

Take a 3-step approach to implement a good social media campaign:

1. Choose your platform: Focus on where your clients and prospects spend their time. As already explained, LinkedIn offers the highest ROI for institutional and high-net-worth individual (HNWI) audiences. You can add other platforms later if needed.
2. Outline your cadence and stick to it: You must explicitly outline how often you intend to do a campaign, and the number of posts for each one. If you don’t stick to this plan, you will not gain any momentum among your audience (see our post on the importance of an editorial calendar). As a pro tip, LinkedIn allows you to schedule your posts in advance, so there’s no excuse to fall behind.
3. Analyze and adjust: Social media platforms give you analytics on the views your posts generate. Use your platform to experiment with the subject matter and style. Often the posts you expect to be successful are not, and vice versa. You have the incredible benefit of a fast feedback loop to tell you what works and what does not, so listen and adjust as necessary.

Social media demands a rigorous process, just like the rest of your day-to-day operations. If you take this process seriously, you will start to notice how powerful social media can be to your business.

 

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So, what do you post?

In short, you must position your posts to build a following around educational and valuable insights.

On one end of the spectrum, keep your audience informed about key firm updates and insights, no matter how insignificant they seem to you. These can be new hires, anniversaries, inaugural events, company days, conference participation – whatever it is, these are important touchpoints to keep you top of mind with your audience.

On the other end of the spectrum, you should post teasers to more substantive insights that you produce as part of your thought leadership strategy. For example, you could post a series of quotes or excerpts from a market commentary, feature article, or white paper to encourage readers to read the full post.

Social media users prefer snippets over long-form materials. That said, social media is also used as a news platform, so use it to drive traffic to your website and distribution lists. Just make sure to keep your posts brief (under 250 words) and consistent enough for the algorithm to work in your favor.

As a final pro tip, make sure you vary your thought leadership formats. You capture the attention of time-poor people (anyone for that matter) by using images, videos, and infographics. It’s human nature that visual information captures attention more effectively than text alone.

Want to know more best practices to establish your firm as a thought leader? Check out our insights library here. 

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