Are your social profiles working for you or against you?
It is essential for insurance agents to optimize their social profiles. Insurance agents should invest some time and effort in optimizing platforms with a proven track record of success for growing agencies. Adopting a new social platform can also be a powerful strategy.
Insurance agents who want to optimize their brand across all platforms should focus on three things:
Their Message
Inbound marketing (using content to attract new leads) relies on social media to distribute pieces like blog posts, white papers, and videos. Social platforms help funnel interested users to an insurance agent’s site to learn more about them.
Part of your message should be aimed at connecting with those in your local community. Demonstrate your involvement with the community by including links to organizations and charities on your social profiles, or showing how your team gets involved directly. It’s a great way to let investigators get to know the human side of your agency.
Their Visuals
One way to take a social profile to the next level is by improving the quality of its images. We always suggest that agents add a professional headshot and cover photo to their Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter profiles.
By putting a face to the name, you will build trust from the beginning.
For your cover photos, use pictures of your team and offices to increase rapport. Focusing on your city is also a great way to make connections–show a local landmark that is easily recognizable.
Remember always to use high-resolution images on your profiles and seek a professional photographer’s help if necessary.
Their Voice
Once you have your brand’s voice, it’s essential to stay consistent and use this voice throughout all your platforms. Ideally, your summaries and social posts will have the same voice as your blogs, emails, whitepapers, and other marketing assets. It should sound like the same person produced them all (even if that is not true).
Optimizing the Big 3
While there are multitudes of social platforms an insurance agent could use, we suggest starting with “The Big 3”. Creating platforms on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter is a safe strategy for insurance agents who want to optimize their social profiles.
Even though LinkedIn’s 722 million users put it 2nd place in size, LinkedIn is still an essential platform for insurance agents to optimize. 50% of internet users with a college degree or higher use of LinkedIn. LinkedIn also attracts a more mature user base, being the only one of the major social platforms where a user is more likely to be 30-64 than 18-29.
With its emphasis on business over personal relationships, LinkedIn has become an integral part of the professional world. Specialized groups within the site have also given rise to a fertile networking environment.
Whether you are looking for a job, looking to hire, looking for leads or vendors, or just representing your company to the professional world, LinkedIn is a vital aspect of your multi-platform strategy.
LinkedIn places a little more emphasis on privacy than Facebook. Because it is a professional site, it is prime ground for cold calling salespeople. When reaching out to a potential connection, you must supply a possible relationship, a company you both worked at, or some other association; otherwise, LinkedIn will ask you to provide the potential contacts email address.
It is possible to sidestep this process, but if you’re reported even a few times, LinkedIn will flag your profile, and you will find it more and more challenging to connect with people on this site.
One of the most potent forms of interaction on LinkedIn is the user’s ability to leave a recommendation for another user. They can also endorse users for specific skills having to do with past performance.
LinkedIn is a crucial tool for any company that wants to present the talent it has in its barracks. Company pages automatically populate with the people who have selected that they work at the company now. This allows the site to represent the collective talents you have gathered behind your company logo.
With 2.7 billion active monthly users, Facebook is the undisputed champion of social networks. That’s a lot of users. And for many of those users, Facebook serves as their home base on the Internet. 70% of Facebook users visit the site at least once-per-day.
There are two types of Facebook profiles — personal and business.
You can decide to use your personal page for business, but you can also choose to keep it private. The first thing you should do is establish whether investigators and clients will see your feed.
A more popular strategy is to keep your personal profile private and do most client interactions through your business page. You can choose your level of public visibility in the settings under privacy.
After creating your personal Facebook profile, you can create a page for your business. While you are logged in to your account, click on the top-right dropdown menu and select “Create Page.”
Next, choose an industry-appropriate for your page, fill in some information about your business, and launch! Select one of the listed categories. You will most likely select “Local Business.”
Add a photo of your location, your office, or another image from your website for consistency. Videos are a powerful way to establish your brand; just remember that 85% of Facebook users watch videos with the sound off. Make sure to include subtitles.
Building an audience is a crucial part of optimizing your profile. Make sure to invite your contacts to like your page. You can also run campaigns that target your ideal client.
With 340 million users, Twitter has the lowest usage rate of any of the platforms we are looking at today, but it is also a much different beast than the other platforms. The 280 character limit Twitter set has been an experiment in reprogramming the way the human brain communicates.
Of all the social systems, tweets have a great way of fostering conversation. Because you can reply to a tweet, join a hashtag conversation, or follow a list of people, Twitter resembles a giant party where innumerable smaller groups break off to have their own discussions.
But everything is always moving forward. There are 500 million tweets per day on the site (that breaks down to just around 6000 tweets per second) so who you follow and who follows you becomes very important.
The #hashtag is one of the most straightforward and most potent bits of technology to surface over the last decade. Adding a # to your profile connects you with people interested in the same topics.
Choose a username that relates directly to your DBA or legal name. Stay consistent with your profiles on other social media platforms to reinforce your brand. Be sure to add a link to your profile and consider pinning a popular tweet to the top of your feed.
Follow thought leaders you think would appeal to your ideal clients. Retweet them when you feel they offer real value. Twitter enables you to act as a curator for your audience.
Lastly, you will want to add a headshot or other photo to your profile. This step is crucial because it will show the users you interact with that you’re a real person and not just a Twitter Egg.
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Optimizing your social media platforms is a powerful strategy for insurance agents who want to generate new leads and engage their existing customers. Remember, after you create your profile, you need to post to it continually. Consistency is the key.
Luckily, thanks to advances in automated technology and social media scheduling tools, maintaining that consistent cadence is easier than ever.
Check out Agency Revolution’s Attract™ to learn more about how they can help you optimize your social marketing strategy.