New tool aims to help firms promote advisors on Facebook

San Francisco-based Hearsay Social Inc. has launched a new feature that promises to give large financial services firms the ability to produce local Facebook advertising campaigns for individual advisors in just a few clicks.

Hearsay Social, whose products include social media management tools for financial services firms, states in an announcement released on Thursday that its new “corporate-to-local advertising” tool will enable marketing professionals to attach the names, office locations and website addresses of individual advisors into firm-branded advertising campaign templates. The result will be “thousands of unique, local ad campaigns with just a few easy clicks.”

The feature is designed to save the time of advisors who may not have the social media experience to produce their own campaigns as well as marketing departments that could have thousands of advisors under their watch.

“Data show that targeted, local content on social media tends to perform better than generic corporate content,” says Mark Gilbert, vice president of products at Hearsay Social, in the statement.

Gilbert cites the results of a study that Hearsay Social released in 2012, which found local business fan pages on Facebook reached a higher percentage of fans and produced more engagement with fans than corporate pages.

The tool will do the work in targeting Facebook followers who have recently experienced significant life events or who fit key demographics, such as age, gender and interests. In addition to focusing on the right groups for the advisor’s business, the ads can be targeted so that the campaigns of a firm’s advisors within the same community are not competing against one another.

Marketing professionals can also measure the success of these campaigns as the tool’s analytics will include the number of visits to the advisor’s website from the Facebook ad in addition to other metrics.

The tool is currently available to the Hearsay Social’s Canadian clients that subscribe to the firm’s omnichannel product, which helps advisors and their firms manage various forms of electronic communications with clients.

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