The broker-dealer and Registered Investment Advisor communities have been rocked with the changes in social media. The speed of communication, need for responsiveness and content creation are paired with the same SEC and FINRA guidelines that apply to slower advertising mediums.
Here are the top 5 ways that proper automation answers these challenging questions for your brokers or investment advisors.
Content Standards
Whether you have 10 or 10,000 brokers, managing content standards requires a robust content generation and implementation schedule. Gone are the days of educating a team with an email of potential approved messages. If you pre-approve messages use a tool that allows your agents to post from the tool.
Rapid Approval
The typical social media message in a financial services firm today requires a minimum of 6 steps from creation to posting. In the fast pace of social media, this will cripple effectiveness and dramatically increase the compliance staff necessary. Rapid approval workflows allow your firm to generate messages and approvals all while tracking the process throughout the organization. Develop your approval process with automated checks and integrated management.
Third-Party Postings
It is simply impossible to capture third-party messaging without automated-persistent tools designed to scrape these pieces of information. Messages could simply be deleted before your ability to capture the message. Firms are judged by their rapid response and identification of these postings. Work to hone your inspection tools to alert quickly to these messages.
Firm Resources
In order to reduce the load on firm resources using social media tools, automated tools allow for lexicon-based search methodologies. Work to develop lexicon-based tools to monitor conversations, private or public.
Retention
Social Media sites create volumes of data in a short amount of time. With manual process it may be possible to keep up with an individual account until a trending moment occurs and volumes can be created in a short amount of time. Having an automated tool to capture all content will keep your firm focused on proper responses rather than retention during high traffic.
With many consultants unaware of how social media truly works, as you evaluate your strategy, make sure you can accomplish as much as possible with automated tools. Without good tools that emulate your workflow, you will require more staff and have slower responses.
