With more people turning to social media for entertainment and education purposes, financial advisors are also starting to see the benefits from utilizing social platforms for passive referrals. According to a report by online reference library DataReportal, there are 4.48 billion social media users around the world, and not just that, the average amount of time spent per day solely using social media is two hours and 24 minutes.  

By tapping on social media, financial advisors will be able to build your digital brand with every online post and build up your network of prospects and referrals. This would also serve as an additional platform for your existing clients to reach out to you. All that is required is a few minutes of your day. 

Building your digital brand 

As a financial advisor, you can and should use social media to build your brand. To start off, you can build your brand by choosing a photo for your profiles, color scheme and determining your brand’s tone of voice.  

Firstly, decide on a photo for your profile which would serve as your brand identifier. Next, determine a color scheme which would remain consistent in all your posts, and that would be considered your “corporate colors.”  

Finally, decide on a tone of voice, which would determine how your post or content would sound like. You could choose to be conversational, humorous, formal, or other tones that you feel suits your style. However, you will need to ensure your tone of voice matches the platform that you choose to publish content on. For example, on LinkedIn, you would typically choose a formal tone of voice and on TikTok, one will decide to go with a more casual or fun tone of voice.  

When your audience gets comfortable with you, they will start interacting and sharing your content, and this would help to promote you to a wider audience, especially when the content you curated resonates with them. Tay Kah Lok, a two-year MDRT member from Singapore, shared, “Personal brand is important for financial advisors right now because I feel that it can help you attract clients, and it is definitely easier for you to attract than to hunt for clients.”  

Building relationships and networks 

Prior to social media, relationship building and networking can be very time consuming. As an advisor, you can only be at one place at a time to develop relationships or network and are limited by this constraint as you could only educate one person at a time. Sometimes you could even end the session with prospects eventually deciding against what you have advised after a two-hour meeting. It can also be costly for advisors to set up road shows or events at MRT stations or heartland malls to get new clients.   

Social media is a great venue for building relationships and networks to reduce time and cost. Creating content for posts might take some time but with that time spent on your post, you are now able to educate multiple audiences at once rather than only that one individual.  

Additionally, you will be able to connect with more people at a time, even as you are on the move. If you are noticing results and are willing to invest in boosting your content to a targeted audience in a certain location who are out of your social circle, some social media platforms have that as an option.       

Optimizing your content 

With social media, you will also be able to analyze and moderate the kind of content your audiences prefer to interact with. These statistics will help you better manage the type of content which grabs attention and position yourself as a thought leader in this field, which would then create an organic flow of passive referrals.  

To wrap up how social media can be utilized to help advisors with branding and passive referrals, Joyce Chan, a three-year MDRT member from Singapore said, “Most of the time, if passive referrals chose to reach out to me, they have already sussed me out on social media. They watched my videos and post there and they feel that they align with my content and values.” 

Contact: MDRTeditorial@teamlewis.com