Advisor Spotlight: VitaVie Financial Planning & Social Media

FINRA/SEC, Financial Advisors, Financial Professionals, Marketing — By Chad Bockius on April 15, 2010 5:08 am

Welcome to the first edition of our Advisor Spotlight. Our goal is to find financial advisors that are successfully using social media to build their business and highlight them here. Ideally we can all learn something from the efforts of these trailblazers as more and more advisors start to take advantage of social media.

Kristin C. Harad or VitaVie Financial Planning was kind enough to spend some time answering the questions below. So let’s get started.

Tell me a little about yourself and your business
“After an accomplished career in financial services marketing, I founded VitaVie Financial Planning, a fee-only financial planning firm focused on the needs of expectant parents and growing families in the San Francisco Bay Area.  By coupling personal financial planning with coaching, I help eliminate clients’ anxiety around money and proactively addresses the issues that arise with the increased financial responsibility that accompanies parenthood.

I have nearly fifteen years of client management experience, working for major financial players including Charles Schwab, Visa, and Chase Bank (JP Morgan Chase). As such, I’ve developed extensive knowledge in retirement planning, credit cards (leveraging what is helpful and getting rid of what is not!), home equity products, and utilizing brokerage services in additional to more general financial planning.

Most of all, I enjoy working with people to help them achieve their goals. I am a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional, completed my Personal Financial Planning coursework at UC Berkeley and earned her Bachelors of Science in Economics from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. I also trained in personal coaching at The Coaches Training Institute and incorporate coaching into my practice to better help my clients identify and achieve their goals.”

You can also see a video profile of Kristin here and don’t forget to follow her on Twitter @vitavie.

What social media outlets do you currently use?
“We’re on Twitter on a daily basis.  We’ll post quick tips or insights, links to interesting articles, and of course links to any content that we’ve put out.

I really like some of the financial social news sites, as it’s a great way to learn what other people are thinking about and promote our own content as well.  We’re very active on Tip’d and have built up a nice network of relationships with some other top users there, many of whom are also financial advisors.

We recently started getting very intrigued by video and are working to figure out how to leverage YouTube and some other sites.  Video is an incredibly powerful way to stand out and communicate exactly the message that you want to convey.  Plus, the search engines absolutely love it — we’ve had some of our videos jump to the top of the search engine results in just two days!

I’m a moderate personal user of Facebook and we’ve brought in a few prospects via Facebook ads, but we haven’t yet figured out what our strategy there will be.  Same with LinkedIn.”

How long have you been using social media?
“I’ve been involved for about a year, and more so in 2010.  My husband, who helps me with our online marketing, is much more involved and helps with a lot of the execution.

Right now we are spending about 15 minutes a day physically on the social media sites.  Writing the content piece takes a little more time as well as doing videos.  This part takes about an hour a day for us. Overall social media represents 25% of strategy and marketing efforts.”

How would you describe your use of social media?
“I view social media as a communications channel.  It’s a really good way to build awareness and an initial relationship with potential clients and it gives us a way stay top-of-mind and deliver useful information to clients.  So far, our efforts are meeting those goals.  Do I expect a 140 word tweet to result in a new client relationship? Absolutely not.  But it helps give prospects a sense of who we are and what we offer, and it’s a very easy way to provide a gentle reminder that we’re here when they are ready to take action.

We have been fortunate to garner positive media coverage and I also contribute to some large financial blogs like Fat Wallet and Bargaineering.  We use sites like Twitter, Tip’d, Digg and StumbleUpon to not only get these pieces in front of our social media friends and followers, but to help build a broader audience for them as well.  Bloggers and media outlets absolutely love it if you can not only help them with a story but help deliver big traffic numbers to it as well; it really helps to expand those relationships.

VitaVie focuses on young and growing families, so I’m not afraid to make the occasional update about fun things I’m doing with my kids, too.”

What results have you seen?
“I know we will see a positive ROI from our efforts. It does take time to develop. Social media is not an overnight vehicle. We believe it will help with retention, brand building and overall connections. In addition it is an invaluable research channel for us. Really it is all part of building stronger connections with people, something that is core to this entire business.

We are finding that video is a much more effective medium to help people get a sense of who we are and why they may want to work with us.  So far, we’ve produced brief interviews with each of our planners and the results are really intriguing.  It’s surprising how many views they are picking up, and many of the prospects I’ve met with recently rave about how much they enjoyed watching them because it gave them such a detailed sense of what it’s like to work with me.  It is also surprising how easy it is to get these videos to rank well and quickly for our best search terms.

As we climb up the video learning curve, we’re going to start doing short videos on broader topics, like our thoughts on budgeting or interviews with some of our favorite service providers.  I think our clients and prospects will both find these types of videos to be helpful and it’s an easy way for us to create some value-added content for them.”

What was your single best learning around social media?
“That you really can form or grow relationships via social media.  I’ve found some other financial professionals who I’ve never met in person that help us out (and vice versa) with communicating our message and providing feedback on things we’re working on a very regular basis.  I’ve also formed stronger relationships with people I do know by engaging with them via social media as well.  Yes, sometimes it’s even fun!”

What is one pitfall other advisors should avoid?
“Viewing social media as an aggressive sales channel.  Just because someone posts that they are looking for a financial planner doesn’t mean that you should contact them out of the blue to say, “Hey, I’m a financial planner.  Hire me!”  It doesn’t work in the offline world and it’s not going to be effective with social media either.  You’ve got to view this as a part of your communications and relationship building strategy.”

What would you recommend to someone just starting out with social media?
“Be patient and be focused.  Pick just one venue, like Facebook and Twitter, and spend your time there.  Don’t spread yourself too thin.  Commit to posting regularly — you only need to spend ten minutes per day, but do it every day.  Remember that success will take time.  You don’t walk into a party and suddenly have 200 conversations going, so don’t expect that to happen with social media either.  Over time, though, you’ll start seeing results and will develop some quality relationships.  (Don’t obsess over friend/follower counts either!)”

What issues are you still overcoming with social media?
“We’re doing a nice job of leveraging social media to bring people to our Web site, but I want to start focusing on using our Web site to start social media relationships with our visitors.  Our Web site brings in a consistent number of visitors, so I want to figure out how to engage them with our social media presences so that we can build a relationship beyond a one-time web site visit.”

How do you plan to expand what you are doing with social?
“Video is definitely our focus now.  It is very intimidating to get started, but now that we’ve made a few videos, we’re finding that it is much easier to do interesting and quality video than we thought. We’ve invested all of $300 in a camera, microphone and tripod and our setup seems to work well now.  It’s pretty fun to climb up the learning curve, too.  I’d like to get to the point where we’re producing brief videos on a weekly basis where we can help people think about different issues they’re struggling with (like understanding the different types of life insurance or how to reduce their financial clutter.)  We can quickly build a nice library that our prospects and clients will not only find really helpful, but will help them connect to us.  I really like the response we’re getting to video so far and I’m eager to start doing more of it.”

How are you archiving your content to ensure FINRA compliance?
“Today we are doing it manually by copying all of our content into a local file. It is time consuming but it is helpful to have all the information readily available and to ensure compliance”

Side note: Kristin hadn’t heard about Socialware Sync, an all in one solution to automatically archive content and make it searchable across all social accounts.

What is one thing you want to leave our readers with?
“You have to know why you are using social media and what result you are seeking. I don’t believe it is for direct sales; it is to build a relationships. People that are successful at planning do so because they want to have relationships with people. Those planners that start with this attitude with intuitively understand how to use these tools to help your business.”

I want to thank Kristin again for participating in this spotlight. It is great to see this kind of success and I’m sure other advisors will love the tips and examples.

If you’re an advisor successfully using social media we want to here from you. Drop us a line and we will slot you for our next spotlight.

Tags: Facebook, Financial Advisors, Financial Services, LinkedIn, Marketing, Sales, Social Media, Social Media Archiving, Social Media ROI, Social ROI, Sync, Twitter, Video