Where to be visible on social media

With so many platforms, and so little time, many businesses struggle with where and how they should participate in social media. 

The truth is you’re either offering digital as part of your service or you’re missing out on connecting with customers who increasingly use Facebook or LinkedIn as their medium of choice.

“If you don’t do something about being digitally present, it’s very easy to get left behind,” says money mentor and certified financial planner Adele Martin.

“Social media platforms present huge opportunities for connecting with customers and can also be a way to attract and retain younger financial staff.”

Those unsure how to use social media should start by looking at how the competition does it. Creating a social media calendar can also help advisers post content to the right channels at the right time. But on which channels should you concentrate your efforts?

LinkedIn’s organic reach

LinkedIn, where most of the C-suite executives are, is the first place to be for business-to-business interaction.

This social media platform offers a healthy volume of eyes-on, with more than 260 million monthly active users, who can be easily identified by their job titles.

“LinkedIn has amazing organic reach that’s simply not available on Facebook, Instagram and other platforms,” says Sabri Suby, founder of Australia’s fastest-growing digital marketing agency, King Kong, and author of international bestseller, Sell Like Crazy.

“LinkedIn is also a lot less crowded, and you can get a much higher share of voice because there's a lot less content being shared, and the algorithm still favours organic (non-paid) sharing.”

Before you write a Leo Tolstoy masterpiece, remember that people spend, on average, about 10 minutes a day on LinkedIn, says online visibility expert Nicola Moras, who advises business owners on digital marketing strategies.

“You want to put up articles that people can consume easily, or short posts with a photo,” she says. “If you post a video, it needs to be less than five minutes and have subtitles on it (as many people watch without the sound.)”

Native video which will garner much higher engagement than something you have shared from another site, adds Suby.

Other social media sites

Every business should have a page on Facebook, the biggest social network worldwide with 2.41 billion users on a daily basis, and post daily to it, says Moras.

“Your posts, whether photos, re-posts, content, or videos, should showcase your knowledge and experience to help build relationships.”

Martin says she is also seeing more clients and opportunities coming from Instagram, which she uses to post video, photos and quizzes.

“I was invited onto (TV show) The Project to talk about first home buyers through a post I did on Instagram.”

Twitter is more about real-time updates than sharing knowledge but with 262 million users globally, you may want to post to it if you can construct short, sharp and shiny messages with a maximum of 280 characters.

Advisers can also post video to YouTube, which has 2 billion active monthly users, says Martin, with “real and raw” better than reading a script.

No matter which platform you choose, the most important thing is consistency, she adds.