What to Post (and When to Post It) to Make the Most of Your Advisor Social Media Accounts

social media blog

By TJ Hill, Director of Marketing

Social media is important—there's no way around that. The number of growth avenues available to businesses has increased exponentially over the last 20 years, thanks in large part to the advent of social media.

If you're reading this article, you're probably already sold on the importance of social media but here are two important stats for advisors in case you need a little convincing (thanks to Broadridge Financial):

  • Nearly 40% of clients follow their advisor on social media

  • Roughly 30% of clients say they relate better to advisors with social media

So yes, social media is worth your time—if for no other reason than to broaden your brand's reach and engage with your current clients in new ways.

“That's great, but what and when should you post?”

Today, I want to talk about the best content to post on your social accounts, as well as the best time to post it.

If you want to post content people will actually engage with, there's no better place to start than...

Video

Social posts with video get 45% more views than posts without.

And when I say video, I don't mean high production values and fancy graphics or animations. 

Smartphone cameras work just as well as anything else, and they help increase the authenticity factor, which can score you big points on social media.

But you might be asking, "Video sounds great, but who has time to write scripts and record themselves all day?"

Check out this video of our good friend, Mark Hannah from Evergreen Wealth.

In this video, Mark just talks about a book he recently read called Essentialism: The Discipline Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. 

Mark briefly discusses his takeaways from the book—like how it breaks things into simple concepts like making space for fun and setting aside time for yourself to rest so you can recharge properly. 

He doesn't have a script, he just gives some quick thoughts and is done in less than a minute.

All that to say that it doesn’t have to be a big production to be received well on social media. 

Pro Tip: Native video (video files like mp4s directly uploaded on the platform) does wonders when it comes to social media algorithms.

Images

If you’re not super comfortable being on video or sometimes lack the creativity to go on-screen, images present an awesome alternative.

Check out this tweet from my good friend Gary Winslow from Work.That.Matters out of South Africa.

I convinced Gary to start a Twitter account and he just took it and ran. In this example, he created a persona—Abigail the financial planner—and used a sample Asset-Map household to show how she would solve complexities in her client’s finances.

With barely more than 20 followers, he garnered four likes and one retweet—great stats given his small audience, and a great example of what images can do to boost engagement.

The difference between a post with an image and one with no image is extraordinary. Social posts with images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only posts.

The bottom line is visuals are memorable and effective, because they help people process, understand, and retain more information more quickly.

When to Post

I get variations on this question all the time: "How often should I post to Twitter? What's the best time to post on Facebook?"

We analyzed our social accounts and found that the answer to this question depends largely on where you're posting. 

I broke the answers down into "Advanced" and "Beginners" based on how frequently you feel comfortable posting, and I include the ideal posting windows for each network in the table below. 

social-posting.jpg

How to Post

Posting on social media so much might sound like a daunting task to keep track of, but there are an abundance of tools to help you schedule your posts outs easily. Here are a few of my favorites:

Industry-specific options:

Non-industry options

Most scheduling software options offer a free trial (or even a free subscription tier), so if you’re not already using one, dig into a few of them and figure out which makes the most sense for you. 

And that’s it! Now that you know what to post and when to post it, how are you going to use social media to grow your business?

Social media isn’t the only place where visuals are more effective. Click here to schedule your demo of Asset-Map and see how our visual-based one-page financial plans can help you get clients more engaged in your meetings.

TJ Hill