One of the most common questions asked of us by clients is: what do we do about our social media?
Unlike comms industry colleagues working with luxury brands, or fast-moving consumer goods, the highly-regulated world of financial services offers fewer opportunities to get creative with your socials. Yes, everyone loves a well-constructed and genuinely original thought leadership campaign on LinkedIn. But what about other, more spontaneous social channels?
This post is written with those simple questions in mind, and the place to start is really understanding the most appropriate use of each platform. Things like tone and context of each post should be tailored to each platform, and always to cater for the audience.
The infographic above, which I have sourced from Add This[1] is a great example of the nuances of four popular social platforms in business.
Remember, you don’t need to be present on all platforms. Choose a few that are most appropriate for your business type and do it well. As a guide, here’s a breakdown of each and how we at Madden & Assoc. have tailored our posts for the individual audience of the platform.
The visual nature of Instragram means it is usually too casual a platform to discuss business transactions or complex material, but that does not mean corporate or financial services brands should ignore the power of the ‘gram. Like many service businesses, quite often we have no tangible product to take a photo of – an image of someone drafting a media release is not very grammable!
However, getting around these limitations is often just a case of being creative – for instance, when we secure a big news story in the papers for one of our clients, we take every opportunity to do a #flatlay.
In a broader strategic sense, our focus with our Instagram presence has been on highlighting corporate culture and providing a glimpse into the world of Madden. Our Instagram grid features team activities, client events, secured coverage and strategy days.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bk3rSeJFm12/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet
Early adopters of Twitter mainly used the platform to communicate what they were doing (I’m eating a #donut) – it was very much a one-way conversation. Nowadays though, the focus is more on creating a dialogue by sharing thoughts and insights that your community may find interesting.
As communications professionals we find Twitter is a great way to keep us on the pulse of what issues journalists and other social media influencers in the financial services industry are talking about. We also use this platform as a proof point to our work, as Twitter’s short form is useful for providing context to a client story.
By engaging with the TV hosts on Twitter, this tweet gained over 2,000 impressions thanks to their engagement
The most corporate of the three platforms mentioned, Linkedin is the place to highlight corporate culture or provide some more industry related content such as technical articles, news, media coverage, company updates and links to resources and tools.
Madden employees are encouraged to share company posts and tag the company page in our work-related posts. This is a good way to increase word of mouth about our company and have an active community interacting with our brand. It also helps to underline our business’s expertise in both the financial services and communications fields when we share thought leadership content or insights from industry conferences and events.
In summary, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate what platforms are appropriate for your business model and set the right tone from day one. Done right, consistent social media marketing should add value to your audience and support other marketing and sales initiatives across your organisation.
[1]Add This, (2018), Social Sites Explained [ONLINE]. Available at: https://www.addthis.com/blog/2015/09/11/how-to-build-a-social-media-marketing-strategy-for-your-business/#.W_934i1L1mA