Social media could be the ideal tool for building rapport with your clients, prospects and centres of influence. After all, the goal of social media is to build relationships and today’s financial advisory business is all about creating good relationships with clients and prospects.

The key to success is using social media to engage people by providing content they find interesting and valuable.

“If you engage people properly, they will call you — and that’s when sales happen,” says Richard Heft, executive director of Toronto-based Ext. Marketing Inc. “But you must engage and share information. If you focus on products or selling, they’ll stop reading.”

As an example of useful content, Heft says, his company’s advisor newsletters always include a lifestyle article.

“This time of year, you can talk about spring cleaning,” he says. “And since spring is a good time to think about RRSP contributions, the article can also mention the benefits of a pre-authorized purchase plan. The call to action is: ‘Contact our office for more information.’ This is a soft way to introduce the financial planning aspect of your business.”

There are many ways to share content on social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can share articles, ask questions, post tips and comment on the posts of others. These networks, Heft says, make it easy to provide value for your readers and position yourself as a subject expert while incenting others to contact you.

Here are additional tips for using social media effectively:

> Focus on others
Social media is about providing information that benefits others, says Sara Gilbert, founder and business consultant with Strategist Business Development in Montreal. “For every article you post about yourself,” Gilbert says, “you should post eight that are of interest to your target market.”

Make sure to include appropriate resources. “For example,” she adds, “if your market is entrepreneurs, share resources designed to help them grow their businesses, such as those from Business Development Bank of Canada.

> Go to where your clients and prospects are
“Before using any social medium as a business development tool,” Gilbert says, “analyze whether your clients are on it. There’s no point spending your time on a network unless your clients are there.”

If your target market is doctors, for example, don’t bother with Twitter, she says, because doctors don’t use it. On the other hand, “tweeting” is a good way to build relationships with reporters, those in the entertainment business and people who work in restaurants and bars.

Heft suggests you use a social media aggregator, a tool that pulls in feeds from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks and centralizes them in one place.

“It’s a bit of a numbers game,” Heft says, “so experiment: find out where your clients go and who views your posts, [then] comments and forwards them.”

> Leverage existing content
The key to managing social media, Heft says, is to leverage content in the form of PowerPoint presentations and other existing materials.

“If you have a presentation you use regularly,” he says, “it can provide an excellent source of blog ideas, generating enough information for 25 posts.”

This is the first instalment in a three-part series on engaging clients through social media.