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Twitter Tips for Financial Planners

Twitter is quickly passing across the threshold from social media fad to must-use communications tool for your business. @DellOutlet has already racked up $6.5 million in sales from its Twitter efforts, Comcast has won rave reviews for its @ComcastCares, and @JetBlue shares news, coupons and travel tips with its 1.6 million followers.

Your financial planning practice may not (yet!) be on this scale, but you still can easily leverage Twitter as an easy and powerful tool to build connections and effectively communicate with prospects and clients. Like any marketing channel, you probably won’t revel in overnight success, but you can quickly grow your Twitter presence by investing just an hour or two per week.

I’d like to share ten tips for leveraging Twitter in your financial practice:

1. Create a compelling profile. Make sure that your Twitter profile page reflects the focus and professionalism of your business. Many designers and services can create custom background design for $100 or less. Craft a pithy description and be sure to use your own photo or logo as your avatar. Remember, the avatar is very small so use or create a legible and engaging image as this will show up next to every tweet that you post.

2. Don’t mix business and pleasure. If you actively tweet about your personal life, create separate accounts for your business and yourself. This doesn’t mean that you can’t tweet about personal matters on your business account – doing so will probably make you more relatable to your followers. But, if you like to trade frequent jabs with your buddies or discuss wild weekend plans, it’s better to segregate these tweets to where prospective clients are less likely to see them.

3. People like links. Tweets that include links to relevant and quality content often generate high click-through rates and are more frequently retweeted than tweets without links. I like to use Bit.ly as my URL shorter because it provides some great tracking that lets me see how many people clicked and retweeted each link.

4. Don’t just self-promote. Twitter is a very effective tool for driving visitors to your own Web site or blog. However, use Twitter solely to promote your own content and you’ll quickly find your followers disengaged. Mix in quality links for a variety of sources so that you provide true value to your followers. For every link to my own content that I tweet, I’ll tweet two more to other sites. Looking for ideas on what else to tweet? Stuff to Tweet is a great Web site that provides a daily selection of interesting stories that you can grab to instantly tweet to your followers.

5. Be a helper, not a salesman. A popular Twitter sales strategy is to search for relevant terms and then contact the poster to offer your solution. For instance, you may search for ‘financial planner’ and then pitch yourself to anyone that tweeted that they are in the market for your services. You may get lucky with the occasional quality lead with this strategy, but you will turn off far more people than you attract. Instead of being a blatant salesperson, try to help people solve their problems with no strings attached. If you are an expert in retirement savings, search for ‘Roth IRA’ and provide value-added answers to peoples’ questions. You’ll attract far more followers and quickly establish a reputation as a helpful expert in the field.

6. Want people to retweet you? Ask them to. You may be frustrated that your tweets are seldom retweeted to a bigger audience. The secret to getting retweeted more often (aside from making good posts) is to ask for it. Start by simply including “Please RT” in your posts. You can also direct message selected followers to ask that you retweet your post to their followers as well.

7. Advertise your Twitter account. Make it easy for your entire audience to find you on Twitter by including your Twitter address on all of your communications. Add a link with your Twitter account to your email signature and include a ‘Follow Me on Twitter’ button on your blog or Web site.

8. Tweet regularly. Prospective followers will quickly lose interest if they see that you haven’t posted an update in weeks. Try to post almost daily, but at least several times per week. Twitter usage is highest during the workday, so if you are making most of your posts late in the evening your followers may never even notice what you have to say.

9. Automate your Tweets. It can be tough and distracting to log onto Twitter several times per day, so consider using a tool to automatically post tweets in the future and continuously run searches on keywords that are important to you. EasyTweets is a great Twitter management tool that can help you set up a week’s worth of posts in just a few minutes, as well as monitor searches, feeds and accounts that you want to keep track of.

10. Stay on top of the evolving compliance guidelines. Twitter and other social media outlets are not immune from regulatory requirements and compliance guidelines are rapidly evolving to keep up with the new ways people are communicating online. FINRA recently released updated social media compliance guidelines and be sure to monitor further clarifications in the months ahead.