WHY COMMUNITY AMONGST FINANCIAL ADVISERS IS NOW MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER BEFORE

Social media might not bump up your leads overnight, but Phil Calvert explains why now is the time to engage with IFA platforms allowing you to share ideas, experiences and expertise on how best to support your clients.

Back in late 2002 I began thinking about running an experiment with financial advisers to see if they would use an online group on a social networking platform to interact and engage with each other – a kind of industry watercooler.

To put this into context, you need to bear in mind that in 2002, social media as we know it today didn’t exist. Yes, people were communicating with each other on a few platforms (Ecademy, MSN Messenger, Friendster), but the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al were still but digital twinkles in entrepreneurs’ eyes.

Xing and LinkedIn were the first big networks out of the blocks in 2003, both of which broadly modelled what Ecademy had been doing since 1998, though Ecademy never really got the recognition it deserved as essentially the world’s first B2B social networking platform.

So I created a group on Ecademy (much like a group that you might find on LinkedIn or Facebook today), and I invited some of the more tech-savvy IFAs I knew to join, where they could network, share best practice, exchange ideas, moan about providers, get marketing ideas and more. Having spent the previous twenty years with the likes of NEL (broadly now UNUM) and Zurich Life, I knew that most IFAs only generally networked with each other by accident – at industry awards, exhibitions, provider events etc. But now there was a new way for financial advisers to network with each other twenty-four hours a day should they want to.

TURNS OUT THAT A GREAT MANY DID WANT TO

Our little online community for financial advisers soon reached four hundred members, and then plateaued because there just weren’t any more advisers out there who were ready to take a plunge into the world of social networking. Very few advisers even had a website – let alone profiles on social networking sites. So we created another version of the group on LinkedIn and also on its own standalone website, and slowly but surely more and more advisers started to join.

Fast-forward to 2020 and our LifeTalk community for advisers has a presence on LinkedIn with 7,100 members, Facebook with 2,080 members and a brandnew marketing and lead generation focused group on the Mighty Networks platform. IFAs still use the groups in the same way – to network, share best practice and to provide help and support to one another, but it’s not surprising that conversations have recently turned towards more pressing matters such as COVID-19.

There are occasionally tensions too. In any online community in any industry you will see some individuals standing out from the crowd for the wrong reasons, but over the years, members of LifeTalk have rarely caused us too many moderation issues. Since 2003, we have only ever had to ban two members, though since the Coronavirus started to take hold in the UK, we’ve not surprisingly seen the occasional bout of ‘tetchiness’ amongst one or two members as stresses begin to surface.

But training and personal development is one thing; what is important more than anything right now is a sense of Community

Most members first thoughts have been to their clients, and our groups have seen a never-ending stream of helpful suggestions on the best way to communicate with clients during this uncertain period.

But tetchiness can also be a sign of underlying anxiety, and it’s clear that many financial advisers who rely on a steady supply of leads or referrals will struggle. Several advisers within larger advice firms have privately told me that leads have completely dried up.

For my part I have been hosting lead generation training via Zoom webinars and last week alone I presented to around three hundred advisers.

But training and personal development is one thing; what is important more than anything right now is a sense of Community.

As more and more social platforms have emerged since 2004, IFAs have repeatedly been sold the idea that social media will attract new clients to them by magic. In fact, my own research suggests that fewer than 5% of advisers in the UK can rely on their social media activities to attract clients. But what has emerged is that IFAs get more value from social platforms when networking with each other rather than when using it to attract professional introducers and new clients.

Most IFAs rarely attract new clients with social media for one main reason – they don’t have a formal social media plan which seeks to engage with their ideal client avatar. And there is still a sizeable percentage of advisers whose compliance regime is stuck in the ark, thus restricting any meaningful use of social media which most other industries and professions enjoy. I also work in the Pharma industry and even they are now realising that online engagement between doctors, influencers, drug companies and indeed patients is now a normal part of business life.

What is bizarre amongst UK financial advice firms is the wildly different approaches taken towards compliance and social media – with more enlightened firms being completely relaxed about what their advisers use it for, coupled with random sampling of posts - to firms that won’t allow their advisers to even post about their favourite football team without it being approved first.

In the meantime, social media has been at its most valuable amongst financial advisers when used to grow community. That said there is still a hard-core group of financial advisers who use online communities to do the exact opposite, and who relish in criticising and attacking other adviser’s business models – and often business models that are successful by any measure.

This must stop if the profession has any hope of uniting in a way that enhances the perceived value of obtaining professional financial advice – which, let’s be honest will be increasingly important as we work our way through the current Coronavirus pandemic.

To their credit, the majority of IFAs in the LifeTalk community on Facebook have stepped up to the mark and are freely sharing ideas, experiences and expertise around how best to support clients during this challenging period.

Community matters, and played right will be the ultimate vehicle for promoting and marketing the value provided by the profession.

Philip Calvert is an author, speaker and marketing consultant to financial advisers