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How to Grow Client Relationships with Social Media

Von — On 5. Dezember 2024

Social media is a valuable channel for financial services firms to acquire clients, build their brands, and attract talent. Unfortunately, many of their client-facing professionals, from advisors to wealth managers to bankers and more, struggle to properly leverage social media — a practice often called social selling. They fail to drive audience engagement, fear they’ll inadvertently violate compliance policies, and ultimately doubt the value of social media altogether.

People scarcely accept random connection requests on LinkedIn, and they tune out excessive corporate content. Yet these are the tactics client-facing professionals often employ to solicit attention and expand their networks.

To win on social media, client-facing professionals need to diversify the content they share without running afoul of their firm’s compliance team. They also need to see proof that their efforts, if done right, will lead to impactful results.

Let’s take a look at what firms and their client-facing professionals can do to truly benefit from social media.

Build authentic relationships 

Social media is an excellent channel to foster relationships and build trust with current and prospective clients. Yet, too many client-facing professionals merely repost corporate content, which comes across as salesy and self-serving. They often come across as little more than advertisers, and advertisers don’t build lasting connections — humans do, especially in a high-trust industry like financial services.

To be more relatable and authentic on social media, client-facing professionals need to use their own voices, share their own perspectives, and even create their own original content. They can accomplish this by sharing three different types of content:

  • Corporate content: This content promotes a firm’s products and services, which harms a client-facing professional’s authenticity if they share it exclusively and too often. While this content is important, it can’t be all an audience sees from an individual, or that individual will eventually be ignored.
     

  • Industry content: This content promotes a firm’s products and services, which harms a client-facing professional’s authenticity if they share it exclusively and too often. While this content is important, it can’t be all an audience sees from an individual, or that individual will eventually be ignored.
     

  • Lifestyle content: This content is strictly personal and has little to nothing to do with work. Lifestyle content can include everything from vacation photos to hobby discussions. Sharing this kind of content goes a long way in humanizing client-facing professionals and may even lead to a professional relationship based on a common interest outside of work.

Sharing content on social media is a non-intrusive way to stay top of mind with clients. If a client-facing professional shares just three posts a week, one per content type, they’ll reach a whopping 156 touchpoints via their social media efforts alone.

However, even if they know what to share and when, client-facing professionals still need encouragement to do it. So, adoption campaigns are critical. In addition to sharing success stories (more on this later), run a recognition program where high achievers are rewarded with prizes like gift cards or even something simple and inexpensive like a trophy or framed certificate. It may sound trite, but it works.

Measure success and inspire more of it

Measuring social media’s impact involves balancing metrics with storytelling. Key marketing metrics like clicks, likes, comments, earned media value, and referred website traffic offer insights into growth and engagement. Revenue metrics, while valuable, are harder to quantify — tying a LinkedIn post directly to sales is often challenging.

Instead, it’s best to focus on metrics that show directional growth over time, incorporating year-over-year comparisons rather than month-over-month or immediate results.

With that said, one of the more readily available metrics you can share are engagement ratios, which show how many likes, comments, and clicks a post received divided by the impressions it received (that is, eyeballs that saw it).  

This ratio validates the effectiveness of humanized content because, according to our own data, posters who rely heavily on corporate content are only likely to see a ratio of about 2%; those who mix it up with more personalized content regularly get to 7.5% or even as high as 10%.