Facebook... Friend or Foe to Stronger Relationships with Clients

If someone were to ask you, as a financial advisor, what it is that you do, you might answer with anything from "help my clients prepare for a happy retirement" to "I help my clients with their investment accounts." Granted, those are services that we perform for our clients, but to cut straight to the root of what we do as financial advisors, it's more applicable to say that we're in the relationship business. Everything that we do as advisors is centered around building and maintaining strong relationships. Building a relationship requires both parties to participate. The relationship is strengthened and maintained by each party consistently contributing to it over time. If one party participates more than another, then we will likely not see much of a relationship.

When it comes to an advisor-client relationship, our clients tend to open up fully about their entire life. They reveal their financial life, personal life, and their hopes and dreams. While in business, I've seen that the most robust client relationships that I have had were the ones that I reciprocated this openness. I spoke to them about my personal life, my aspirations, my end game. I didn't hide it; I shared it. The good and the bad. The life experiences I shared with them allowed them insight into my life and the thought process that goes into my decisions. And when I look back at those clients that I was never able to gel with entirely or that ultimately left me, it's easy to see that we didn't have much of a connection. I probably never really took enough time to learn about them and their desired activities during the day. Instead, it was strictly business. They saw me as their "financial guy," and that meant that I wasn't their "friend" or someone they shared experiences with.

As I look forward to how to scale this sharing of experiences, I see advisors making the mistake of not seeing Facebook as an avenue to do this. And although a recent study indicated advisors overwhelmingly plan to drive new business from social media marketing, I think there's still a missed opportunity within technology to reciprocate our client's openness. The pushback I often hear to this is that Facebook isn't where their target market is. But this is wrong. In fact, one in every two people aged fifty-five or older is on Facebook. They're the demographic behind Facebook's current growth. And their motivation behind joining the network makes sense. Their kids are moving away, having kids and they want to stay connected with them. The number of individuals within this age group, your target market, will continue to grow.

Quick Takes:

-Always be yourself on Facebook

-Facebook is a great platform to acquire new clients while also serving your current clients better.

-Your clients are on Facebook, and you can use it as a tool to strengthen your relationship with them.

Another pushback I hear from advisors is that they do not want to have "that type" of relationship with their clients. They don't want them to know about their family life, what they do in their free time, etc. By thinking this way, they're dismissing an opportunity to deepen their relationships and move past being just their client's "financial guy." A stable and lasting relationship is what holds the client true to you during those rough market times. The way to use social media to our gain is not only to see the ad and marketing side of it that's useful in "buying" new clients but instead as a comprehensive tool that allows us to deepen relationships with our current clients as well.

Your clients may not feel comfortable admitting how much they actually use it, but even if they just peruse, they will see your life and build a stronger connection with you. Ultimately, Facebook is a tool to help you continue to serve your clients and stay in front of them. Although serving your clients by telling them their account balances and getting them on track for retirement is important, building a strong relationship is equally as important.