March 15, 2022

What’s the Cost of Getting Social Media Compliance Wrong?

Increasingly, customers are turning to digital providers for their financial needs — traditional lenders have dropped to only 21% of mortgage sales today. But even the highest-quality AI software can’t offer the basic building blocks of trust: guidance, reassurance, customization, and empathy.

That’s why capitalizing on the human experience and fostering genuine human interaction through social selling is key for traditional FIs to stay ahead. The trick, however, is doing it compliantly.

Compliance missteps can cause serious damage. In early 2021, for example, MassMutual received a hefty $4.75 million penalty for not ensuring its agents followed social media compliance regulations. This might be an extreme example, but any financial institution can still land in hot water if it fails to maintain FINRA-compliant digital communications. It’s vital to put compliance at the forefront of any financial institution’s social selling strategy.

Social Media Compliance for Financial Institutions From Denim Social

Denim Social is a social media compliance-first experience, as compliance is the thread that runs through our programming rather than an add-on or patch. Our tools are fully integrated to give a reliable, easy-to-use experience for financial services marketers. For this reason, financial institutions can feel safe relying on our software to help them meet their social selling goals.

How does Denim Social serve financial institutions interested in keeping up with compliance rules and regulations?

1. We offer protection.

The best way to ensure compliance is by finding and flagging potential content issues before any of it goes live on a site. Our workflows make sure the right eyes view and approve each post before publishing.

Keyword filtering flags problematic words or phrases ahead of time. And when team members try to use any restricted keywords, employees will immediately be notified of the issue — whether the content is a post, comment, or even a DM. Over time, your employees will begin to recognize restricted phrases even before the system notification appears. If there’s ever a need for damage control, Denim Social’s newest tools let administrators edit or delete users’ online messages. It can also prevent posts to out-of-compliance social networks altogether.

2. We provide constant training on social compliance.

Many of our users say the Denim Social platform offers ongoing compliance education. Your team members learn by osmosis as they test filters and receive feedback from Compliance, which continually educates your team and builds an ongoing culture of compliance among them. As they see what posts are approved versus unapproved, they receive real-time social media compliance education.

3. We curate content streams.

Using our enablement tool, teams can create libraries of preapproved content to keep employees’ social feeds full without additional approvals or workflow submissions. And if curating a full library of content on your own sounds daunting, you’re in luck. Our partnership with UpContent provides content sourcing with curated third-party content from hundreds of thousands of trusted publishers. You can optimize your time with “hands-free” curation around the clock.

This process streamlining will help your financial institution and employees build up a reputation for continuous social media use and allow you to turn your focus to vetting more personalized content. Trust that the curated content streams keep the lights on while you reach the 71% of consumers who expect personalized experiences.

4. We keep your records neat and organized.

Audits can happen at any time. Hopefully, you’ve moved past binders, but even if you’re keeping a spreadsheet of social posts, it’s not adequate or efficient for creating scalable, compliant social strategies. With our record-keeping tool, we automatically archive every post, comment, and like in our system, allowing you to easily find and share reports as needed for auditing. As you scale, it won’t be possible for a human on your team to capture everything. This is an essential protection for future audits and allows you to put your energies toward tasks other than record-keeping.

The importance of social media marketing for financial institutions is growing exponentially. So is the need for social media marketing tools that can keep up with compliance needs and ever-changing FINRA rules and expectations. If your financial institution is ready to dive into social selling but you’re concerned about remaining compliant, talk to Denim Social.

RESOURCES

LEARN
March 15, 2022

What’s the Cost of Getting Social Media Compliance Wrong?

By
Denim Social

Increasingly, customers are turning to digital providers for their financial needs — traditional lenders have dropped to only 21% of mortgage sales today. But even the highest-quality AI software can’t offer the basic building blocks of trust: guidance, reassurance, customization, and empathy.

That’s why capitalizing on the human experience and fostering genuine human interaction through social selling is key for traditional FIs to stay ahead. The trick, however, is doing it compliantly.

Compliance missteps can cause serious damage. In early 2021, for example, MassMutual received a hefty $4.75 million penalty for not ensuring its agents followed social media compliance regulations. This might be an extreme example, but any financial institution can still land in hot water if it fails to maintain FINRA-compliant digital communications. It’s vital to put compliance at the forefront of any financial institution’s social selling strategy.

Social Media Compliance for Financial Institutions From Denim Social

Denim Social is a social media compliance-first experience, as compliance is the thread that runs through our programming rather than an add-on or patch. Our tools are fully integrated to give a reliable, easy-to-use experience for financial services marketers. For this reason, financial institutions can feel safe relying on our software to help them meet their social selling goals.

How does Denim Social serve financial institutions interested in keeping up with compliance rules and regulations?

1. We offer protection.

The best way to ensure compliance is by finding and flagging potential content issues before any of it goes live on a site. Our workflows make sure the right eyes view and approve each post before publishing.

Keyword filtering flags problematic words or phrases ahead of time. And when team members try to use any restricted keywords, employees will immediately be notified of the issue — whether the content is a post, comment, or even a DM. Over time, your employees will begin to recognize restricted phrases even before the system notification appears. If there’s ever a need for damage control, Denim Social’s newest tools let administrators edit or delete users’ online messages. It can also prevent posts to out-of-compliance social networks altogether.

2. We provide constant training on social compliance.

Many of our users say the Denim Social platform offers ongoing compliance education. Your team members learn by osmosis as they test filters and receive feedback from Compliance, which continually educates your team and builds an ongoing culture of compliance among them. As they see what posts are approved versus unapproved, they receive real-time social media compliance education.

3. We curate content streams.

Using our enablement tool, teams can create libraries of preapproved content to keep employees’ social feeds full without additional approvals or workflow submissions. And if curating a full library of content on your own sounds daunting, you’re in luck. Our partnership with UpContent provides content sourcing with curated third-party content from hundreds of thousands of trusted publishers. You can optimize your time with “hands-free” curation around the clock.

This process streamlining will help your financial institution and employees build up a reputation for continuous social media use and allow you to turn your focus to vetting more personalized content. Trust that the curated content streams keep the lights on while you reach the 71% of consumers who expect personalized experiences.

4. We keep your records neat and organized.

Audits can happen at any time. Hopefully, you’ve moved past binders, but even if you’re keeping a spreadsheet of social posts, it’s not adequate or efficient for creating scalable, compliant social strategies. With our record-keeping tool, we automatically archive every post, comment, and like in our system, allowing you to easily find and share reports as needed for auditing. As you scale, it won’t be possible for a human on your team to capture everything. This is an essential protection for future audits and allows you to put your energies toward tasks other than record-keeping.

The importance of social media marketing for financial institutions is growing exponentially. So is the need for social media marketing tools that can keep up with compliance needs and ever-changing FINRA rules and expectations. If your financial institution is ready to dive into social selling but you’re concerned about remaining compliant, talk to Denim Social.

Subscribe to our newsletter and get the latest sent to your inbox.
Thank you for subscribing!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
SIMILAR POSTS:

What Is Social Selling?

Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business. 

Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships. While this has traditionally been done in person for financial services, the digital landscape offers endless possibilities for relationship building. By now marketers and business leaders are familiar with social media and see the opportunity to build their brand, but most have only scratched the surface. To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. 

It’s called social selling and it works.

Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.

Social selling is the perfect crossroads of marketing and sales. It enables intermediaries – like loan officers, financial advisors and insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity. Savvy marketing and sales teams unlock the power of relationships with social selling, enabling intermediaries to compliantly communicate, share and sell on the social channels of their choice.

Consider this: employees have 10x the reach and drive double the engagement compared to brand pages on social media. But it’s about more than likes and comments, social selling can transform social media into a revenue driver for your institution. Sales reps who regularly share content are 57% more likely to generate leads. The numbers check out, but social selling is also about building the intangible relationships that are the lifeblood of the industry.

The Intermediary is Here to Stay! Social Selling is a non-negotiable to drive a modern marketing strategy.

Products are increasingly digitized and direct-to-consumer business is on the rise, but that doesn’t mean the role of the intermediary is going away. It’s just changing. The way agents, loan officers and advisors interact with digital products will look different from the past, but the role of the advisor will always be needed. Human connection will remain a meaningful part of financial transactions. As expectations change, marketing and sales teams need to meet consumers on the channel of their choice. Social media isn’t going anywhere. It’s where consumers are interacting with each other, looking for advice, and looking for thought leadership on important life topics. This means intermediaries and producers have to be there.

My brand is on social media, so we’re social selling, right? 

Not quite. If your brand is active on social media, you’re off to a great start, but you’re leaving opportunity on the table if you’re not empowering agents, loan officers, advisors and more to share on social. If you only have brand pages, you’re not social selling yet.

Watch Here: Beyond the Brand | Social Selling Best Practices

Forward-thinking marketers understand the power of social media at all stages of their marketing funnel. From awareness and consideration to loyalty and even advocacy, social and digital channels can and do inform purchase decisions. Financial institutions are catching on — more than 90% of the 50 largest banks are currently on Facebook, and 88% have active Twitter accounts — but being on social media doesn’t equate to a strong social media strategy. Today’s digital market requires an integrated strategy that meets target audiences throughout the buyer’s journey. This means investing in paid social campaigns alongside organic and driving deeper relationships with customers through social selling.

Sounds easy, right? While marketers may understand the strategies and costs associated with modern social success, senior decision makers may still need educating and persuading. That’s why it’s essential to be able to effectively communicate the benefits of integrated social media strategies. In addition to intangible benefits like building trust and humanizing your brand, both organic and paid social selling strategies offer metrics that enable marketers to prove value.

The Intermediary is Here to Stay: Products are increasingly digitized and direct-to-consumer business is on the rise, but that doesn’t mean the role of the intermediary is going away. It’s just changing. The way agents, loan officers and advisors interact with digital products will look different from the past, but the role of the advisor will always be needed. Human connection will remain a meaningful part of financial transactions.

As expectations change, marketing and sales teams need to meet consumers on the channel of their choice. Social media isn’t going anywhere. It’s where consumers are interacting with each other, looking for advice, and looking for thought leadership on important life topics. This means intermediaries and producers have to be there. 

Source: LinkedIn Social Selling Index

Building A Social Selling Program

Being responsible for your team’s social selling strategy can be daunting, especially if you don’t have a plan or support. We see it firsthand at Denim Social – without a meaningful strategy, users may not be eager (or downright resistant) to jump on a new platform. So, how are others getting their teams onboard? We talked to a few Denim Social customers to learn how they’re making it happen and we saw four keys to adoption success.

Activate a hybrid distribution approach.

We find that teams that utilize social selling have the most empowered associates because they are able to create personalized, engaging content. However, we have also found that a hybrid distribution approach can be a great stepping stone to social selling. This usually includes the marketing team posting brand content on behalf of associates, and associates scheduling out pre-approved industry content from a content library, plus sprinkling in their own personal content. And rest assured, that personal content still goes through approval workflows.

Build a robust content library.

‍If you’re going to ask associates to post content, you’ve got to make it easy and compliant. Our platform offers content libraries filled with pre-approved posts. We see that when associates have lots of content to choose from, they post more frequently.

“We have implemented several resources and training opportunities to encourage users to stay engaged. We update libraries on a weekly basis and send a weekly content digest via email to remind our users to get into the system and schedule their posts, said Amy Leonard, officer digital marketing specialist at Johnson Financial Group.

Communicate the value of social media consistently.

‍Your teams need to be able to answer the age-old question, “what’s in it for me?” Your teams are busy and that means you need to help them see why spending their valuable time on social media is worth it.

“Whenever you bring on a new platform, user adoption can be a challenge. Once users embrace Denim Social, they see that it actually saves them time,” said Leonard.

Seth Reeks from Evolve Bank and Trust finds that communicating the benefits of social media AND Denim Social combined are the most impactful. He uses real information from top performers to show their peers why social media can help drive relationships and business.  He provides them with brand and industry focused content on an ongoing basis. Then he shows them how they can schedule out their content efficiently using Denim Social.

“I tell them if they put in just a little work at the beginning of the month, they’ll see big results,” said Reeks.   ‍

Train and Train Again‍

Baking social media and Denim Social training into the onboarding process is a great way to introduce new and motivated associates to a fresh way to drive their business.  It is also important to keep social media top of mind for ALL associates. An ongoing training program outlining compliance/social policy, the value of social media and Denim Social is a must, whether it be monthly or quarterly. Marketing is not often top of mind for salespeople, so it is important to continuously educate them on how to get involved and optimize their strategies.  

Allison Dickinson, social media specialist at AnnieMac Home Mortgage oversees the creation of their hugely successful mortgage loan officer training program, which includes a monthly new hire social media and compliance training course and Denim Social overview, a monthly Denim Social refresher training, a Quarterly Strategy Training, and ongoing 1:1 assistance for users.

“We have monthly Denim Refresh trainings to keep our users updated and knowledgeable about the platform. One thing we like to do is host one-on-one trainings to make sure they understand the workflow and that Denim is easy for them to use,” said Dickinson.

This training program is a well oiled machine, and keeps their social program growing by educating and informing users consistently.

If you’re struggling with adoption, these strategies can help. And of course, persistence pays off.

“Don’t give up! In the beginning, we had no users, no one managing their social media. Now we have over 100 users handling their own social media accounts,” said Reeks. “If we had quit back in the beginning when it was tough to get buy-in, we wouldn’t have the program that we have now.”

Social media is only as valuable as its users and that makes adoption key. If you’re struggling to motivate your team to hop on the social media bandwagon the right tools and support can make all the difference. 

Watch Here: Driving User Engagement on Social Media 

So you’re ready to launch a social selling program, but where do you start?

Developing a social selling strategy and launching a program can be daunting. As you know, marketing and sales teams are already juggling full plates. Adding social to the mix is a culture shift, and supporting hundreds or thousands of producers in weaving social into their everyday processes isn’t a small feat. Remember that social selling is more than marketing: It’s using social media as a digital relationship-building and sales tool. This mindset shift can take some time, and launching your strategy and program won’t happen overnight.  

This is one of our favorites: LinkedIn’s 2022 State of Sales Report found the most successful sellers at large companies — those reaching more than 150% of quota — routinely use technology to build human connections with buyers.

Align with Your Team on the Definition of Social Selling

As a marketing pro, you know what social selling is by now, but what about your team? This step may sound obvious, but you need to work to define social selling in your organization and differentiate from brand social media. Intermediaries may have less experience with social selling. Take the time to talk about what social selling can do and educate your teams on using social media as a sales tool. This time spent learning a new marketing tactic is very much worth your loan officers’, advisors’ and agents’ time, too. Prove it to them by sharing meaningful stats on the benefits of social selling.

Educate Your Sales Team

Remember that social selling isn’t just marketing’s responsibility. It’s an effort that should be supported by both marketing and sales. If you’re in a marketing role looking to launch social selling for your advisors, loan officers and/or agents, take the time to educate your sales partners on social selling. Craft your elevator pitch on how social helps intermediaries meet customers where they are in the digital landscape and how enabling them on social helps amplify your brand messaging. Keep in mind that social media in a heavily regulated industry can feel risky, and adding it to the mix of sales tactics that have “always been done a certain way” can feel like a huge change. Patience is key! Own the narrative around social selling, build your group of internal champions to help with this culture shift, and invest time in change management and your communication plan.

Find Your Social Selling Technology

Once you’ve got your internal teams aligned on launching social selling for your producers, it’s important to find a tech solution to make it all easier! Seek a solution that creates efficiencies for the administrators of your program and your users. For instance, does your platform account for compliance coverage? Does your vendor understand the nuances of your industry? As you’re evaluating potential platforms, make sure to consider both the administrative and end-user experience, as well as both organic and paid capabilities. A holistic social selling platform will include all these things.

Identify Social Maturity

So you’re changing the narrative, gaining buy-in, and you’ve got the right tools to help you — what’s next? It’s time to dig into your user group to identify social maturity. You don’t have to do it all at once — a phased approach with folks of different social maturity levels will make this easier to learn and scale from. Start by simply searching for your intermediaries on social media. How easy is it to find them? Are their pages updated and on brand? Is their “about” info robust and accurate? Have their profile photos been updated in the last decade? If you are answering “yes” to a lot of these, you already have a great start. Those are your people. But if you aren’t, that’s OK — you’ll just need to start with some generalized social education and profile optimization to get your group started. Taking the time to deliver this education is critical in making social selling stick.

Train and Test Your User Group

Once you’ve identified agents, advisors or loan officers who are either already active on social or ready to be active, start communicating. Let your whole organization know that you’re launching a social selling program. The more folks who know, the more they can support your work. Then, communicate with your first user group; let them know what to expect throughout the launch, including your level of support and upcoming training to get them started. And finally... train! Depending on the level of social maturity of your launch group, this might mean starting with the basics of each social platform, as well as the basics of organic and paid social. If your users are super ready, it could mean jumping right into your social selling tech solution.

Measure Success and Optimize Over Time

Once you have momentum, fuel that success with regular content. It takes time: Start simply by creating versions of your brand content for individuals and add this content to your content planning processes (for instance, you might craft language your agents can use to share branded social posts). One of the perks of Denim Social? We curate your library with our content integration. Finally, measure your success and share it with your internal champions, teams, and leadership. Your measurement might just consist of basic content usage and engagement at first, but it will ultimately grow to measuring return on ad spend and leads generated. Take the time to celebrate small wins and educate your internal partners on the growth of your social selling program. Check in with your social sellers to make sure they’re understanding the value and celebrating with you.

Download: Social Selling Made Easy 

Want to keep learning and training with your team?
Publishing Basics for Admins

Publishing Basics for Producers

Social Selling Best Practices

If you are posting the same content on every social media network, you might be missing out on key engagement opportunities for your social selling strategy. What gets the most attention and engagement on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn isn’t universal, and financial marketers would be wise to seek a more nuanced strategy than just casting a wide net and hoping for the best. While there are general best practices to posting on social, making just a few distinctions to how you approach each of your networks can help you beat the dreaded social media algorithms and build credibility and expertise at the brand and individual producer levels. Let’s take a look at each network and how banks, wealth management firms, insurance agencies, and mortgage lenders can customize their strategies to the unique needs of each network to achieve growth and success.

Facebook: This is what you should know about our financial institution. 

Despite the emergence of new networks and the inevitable departure of Gen Z and Millennials, Facebook is still the most popular social media network, and it’s a non-negotiable for any business. For community banks and other smaller financial businesses, it is the perfect medium to connect with local communities. This network will be one of the first places many customers look for a business, so having updated and branded profile information is essential. It’s ideal for sharing important dates or events, announcements, or anything customers need to be in the know about. Utilize brand pages for general information, and allow your agents, advisors, or employees to curate more personalized content on their individual business pages. 

How To Succeed:

  • Share a wide variety of content geared towards informing and connecting with audiences
  • Post content related to the local community and partnerships with other business or organizations
  • Take advantage of user-generated content to build and maintain relationships with customers at the brand and producer levels
Download: Best Practices for Building Your Facebook Page

Twitter: Talking about our #financialinstitution. 

Sometimes Twitter seems like a mystery with its unique format, hashtag content, and 280-character limit. Like any other network, customers and prospects will consult a company’s account to find information they need to know; but more importantly, Twitter is a network people go to in order to hear news and opinions - and share their own. It is primarily a resource for sharing thought leadership and staying informed about industry updates. To be set up for success, brands and producers should follow relevant accounts like competitors, local businesses, and industry leaders. Hashtags are a useful way to learn about the broader conversations happening- plus, they provide insight into the hashtags marketers should be incorporating as well. Like any other network, brands engaging in social selling will enjoy the benefit of more engagement and awareness opportunities. 

How To Succeed:

  • Prioritize engaging in existing conversations, rather than creating original content
  • Retweet relevant information for your customers and your brand, and utilize the mention function to increase visibility
  • Follow and use hashtags related to your industry to stay connected to current events and other thought leaders
Download: Best Practices for Building Your Twitter Profile

LinkedIn: This is what our financial institution wants you to know, and why.

Branded as the professional social network, LinkedIn is perhaps the most important place for financial services brands and employees to be when it comes to social selling. This is a great way for brands to grow their reach by tapping into the power of user connections through sharing thought leadership and need-to-know information regarding their industry. Plus, authenticity is increasingly important on LinkedIn, with customers preferring to interact with brands that seem more relatable. Marketers and individual producers can use LinkedIn to share those values and insights into company culture that make people feel connected: photos, videos, and important awards or achievements can help boost engagement and brand awareness. With the power of a brand page combined with employee advocacy through social selling, LinkedIn should be a main focal point for any financial institution. 

How To Succeed:

  • Share images of community and in-person interactions and events with context on what it means to your business
  • Follow local businesses from your actual business page (such as: local library, schools, industry competitors, local figures) and engage with their posts from your business page
  • Share high-performing posts from industry thought leaders and other local businesses; this boosts their engagement and gets visibility for both of you
Download: Best Practices for Building Your LinkedIn Profile

Instagram: Here’s a photo or video of what our financial institution values. 

As a highly popular and visually-appealing social media network, Instagram is ideal for demonstrating a more human side to any financial brand, which is especially important for connecting with younger customers. This network is meant to be fun and entertaining for followers, while also staying on brand for financial companies and still informative. Of all the networks, Instagram is going to be the easiest way to reach younger audiences and get creative with content. For brands engaging in social selling, it’s a fun way to give producers a chance to show their personality and connect with customers on a more casual level. Instagram is also very dynamic and visual: the Reels and Stories functions provide alternative ways to share and engage quickly with video, which provides more opportunities to get in front of audiences within the platform than image posts alone.

How To Succeed:

  • Post images from community or in-person interactions; share important posts to brand and producer Stories, then save to Highlights
  • Use emojis in copy and keep text light and fun; it’s all about the visuals on this network
  • Follow other businesses/industry thought leaders; engage with their content and share posts to your own stories
Download: Best Practices for Building Your Instagram Profile

While every network has its own charms and best practices, there are a few overall things to keep in mind when launching a social selling program: stay authentic and non-salesy; keep compliance matters in mind; know how to maintain a balanced and informed feed; and finally, don’t forget that paid advertising can boost organic efforts on any network. Knowing what to post on each social media network can be overwhelming, but understanding the best way to approach social selling at the brand and individual levels on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn will translate to more engagement, better brand awareness, and increased trust from industry leaders and customers. With a little fine-tuning and support for your team, you can see the difference a network-based content approach can make for your financial institution.

Check Out These Social Media Network Best Practices for Social Selling:

LinkedIn Best Practices
Twitter Best Practices

Facebook Best Practices
Instagram Best Practices

Let’s talk about social media compliance for financial institutions.

In today’s digital landscape, marketers know that social media is a key element to any successful strategy. Social selling is a smart approach to empower financial advisors, loan officers and associates in social media, but it comes with risks. After all, just one rogue post could land your financial institution in regulatory hot water. Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your employees from making the most of social media. Think your team is ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions:

Do I know who has social media access and control? 

Your social strategy won’t be compliant unless it’s properly governed, so start by clearly documenting who has access to and control over what social media channels. According to the FFIEC, your social media policy needs to clearly outline individual roles and responsibilities on social. When roles are clearly defined, you’ll eliminate authorization confusion and avoid regulatory trip wires

Is my social media policy well-documented? 

If you don’t already have a social media policy in place, then it’s time to put one together. If you already have one, check that it is up-to-date. Ensure the policy is easy for all employees to digest, understand and implement.

Am I tuned-in to what’s happening on my social channels? 

You should be monitoring all activity across your brand’s and employees’ social media channel to ensure posts and engagement is compliant. 

Am I prepared for an audit? 

Surprise! You’re being audited. Be sure you’re ready with a social media archive that captures all postings and engagement activity. 

Do I have a clear picture of my social media risks? 

You could be fined for a mistake that slipped through the cracks if you don’t have fail-safes, like approvals and compliance checks, in your workflows. Start with a social media risk assessment, and if you already have one, consider re-reviewing it regularly.

Trend Report: A Marketer’s Guide to Social Selling

As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions. Surely every marketer has found frustration in the often slower-than-average pace of digital adoption and change in the financial industry, but there can be benefits. Namely, financial marketers can look to more forward industries (like consumer brands and tech), to see what’s catching on and evolving. Even if you’re not quite ready to dive-in, as new trends emerge, financial marketers can begin to lay the groundwork with leaders for the future. Whether you’re in banking, mortgage, insurance or wealth management, we see a few key trends that every financial institution should begin preparing for.

But why change what’s working? If your institution hasn’t already come around to digital first marketing, let us put this gently – it’s time. In practice, this looks like moving marketing dollars from traditional media to social media centric digital strategies. Consumers in every age group are shifting to digital and it becomes more pronounced the younger the consumer. Younger generations are digital natives and their use of technology is rapidly increasing. In fact, about half of teens say they use the internet almost constantly, up from only about a quarter of teenagers who said the same less than 10 years ago. 

We get it, teens aren’t big revenue drivers for your institution… yet. Believe it or not, younger generation buyers now dominate the housing market, with Millennials representing 43% of home buyers. Housing is only the tip of the iceberg with younger audiences too. A massive generational transfer is underway as Baby Boomers age. Experts predict that $84 trillion will change hands in the next 25 years. All of this is to say, financial marketers need to be where their consumers are. Today, that means social media. Digital marketing and social media show no signs of slowing down, so financial institutions need to invest accordingly

Growth of Short-Form Video Content for Financial Services

Growth in short-form video is both changing what consumers watch and how they watch it. Even on other more traditional social media networks, attention spans are getting shorter. For example, short-form videos were just 21% of YouTube views in Q2 2021, but jumped to a whopping 57% of views in Q2 2022. Social media users are favoring videos in the 30 second to 1-minute range. 

The Rise of Financial Advice Influencers

Whether institutions like it or not, people are getting financial advice on social media. And it’s a trend that’s unlikely to change – Generation Z are almost five times more likely to get financial advice from social media platforms than people aged 41 or over. While this may feel like a challenge for financial marketers, at Denim Social, we see it as a massive opportunity. 

Increase in Personal Content and More Authenticity on Professional Channels

As more and more institutions adopt social selling strategies that put their people front and center, we’re seeing an increase in personal content. User-generated content is at the heart of a good social selling strategy because it is authentic. 

Enhanced Marketing Automation Connections

As institutions build out bigger social selling programs that include both paid and organic strategies, scale is always a challenge. Smart marketers are looking to increase marketing automations to help them effectively and efficiently manage digital marketing strategies. In fact, 63% of marketers plan to increase their marketing automation budgets. 

Social Media as Search Engine

Social media has long been viewed as an excellent brand-building tool, but today, financial institutions need to consider the value of social profiles for search discoverability. Increasingly audiences – especially younger ones – are using social media as a search engine. Recent Google research shows that nearly 40% of Gen Z prefers using TikTok and Instagram for search over Google.

The future of social media for financial institutions is bright and marketers who continue to advocate for increased social resources will reap the rewards. Whether you’re launching a social selling program or building your marketing automations, thinking long-term will help your team build toward a more connected and successful future. Remember this: You don’t have to be ready to dive into the next big thing right now, but it’s important to stay current with the social media trends of today so that you don’t get left behind tomorrow.

Content Strategy
Watch: Marketing Mix for an Informed & Healthy Social Media Feed

Organic social media should still have a place in your strategy, especially in a social selling program. Cultivating organic posts from your associates' accounts is a great way to add context, richness, and humanity to your brand. For current customers, organic social media posts can be a way to demonstrate the heart and culture of your company as you provide “behind the scenes” and in-office content that speaks to the personalities and values of your employees and institution.

For prospective customers, organic social can serve as a "verifier." A strong social media presence signals to prospects that your company and employees are legitimate and lends more insight into your value proposition.

However, what’s missing in this social media marketing strategy is the value for top-of-funnel leads — those who don’t know anything about your institution yet. According to a recent study, only 2.2% of your followers see your posts on Facebook, 5.5% on LinkedIn, and 9.4% on Instagram. Paid social media advertising is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, loan officers, or advisors to your institution at the right place and the right time.

Organic and Paid: Better Together

Organic and paid social have a symbiotic relationship. Organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, while paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.

For instance, if you’re working for a wealth management firm, your top-of-funnel leads are unlikely to find your firm by searching Facebook, but if they happen to be scrolling and see your Facebook ad for a financial advisor's retirement planning services, they are more likely to navigate to your social and landing pages. There, your organic posts, which have been building over time, can show off the legitimacy of your brand and your advisor's expertise.

The question, then, is how to marry existing organic strategies with paid campaigns in your social media strategy for the highest return. Start here:

1. Amplify what works (and drop what isn't).

With paid social media ads, you can see immediate results, which makes them great for testing. If a post is underperforming, use A/B testing to experiment with different images, copy, and calls to action to make improvements for the future. A/B testing helps you isolate what elements of your ads need to change by showing which ones resonate and which don’t.

This method can even be applied to previously organic content: Did an employee's post have unexpectedly high engagement? Use it as a blueprint to try to isolate why. A paid ad will bring the post in front of greater audiences, and changing a few aspects can help identify why it was so successful in the first place.

As you see what’s performing, invest more dollars into posts that convert while cutting or changing content that doesn’t. With paid social media ads, you can see immediate results versus organic’s longer-term commitment. That makes paid ads well-suited to testing.

2. Expand your audience base.

Both organic and paid social media can help increase your reach on social media, and it starts with activating advisors in addition to brand pages. A social selling approach can increase your results tenfold and drive higher engagement. Facebook ads reach 1.95 billion average monthly users, and an average user clicks 12 ads per month, so significant reach is up for grabs.

With an organic social selling strategy, you can reach more people in your existing social and professional communities. But with a complementary paid ad strategy on top of that, you can break through your first-degree social connections to reach second- and third-degree connections, who will include important professional referral sources.

Utilize paid amplification of employee posts to benefit. Your advisors should be your brand's ambassadors, so up your social selling game by maximizing the reach of their posts.

3. Drive leads into conversions.

Don't let your marketing funnel lead to dead ends. Make sure employees are linking back to your site or other relevant brand content. A well-crafted organic post that drives to a landing page can be the start of a meaningful digital experience that creates business results. Combine this with paid social media ads, which can generate leads by offering call-to-action options that get attention and clicks.

For instance, an organic post can drive a prospective customer to a first-time homebuyer guide. But a paid social post lets you experiment further with a call-to-action button that makes taking the next step easy for potential customers.

General Social Selling Advice

Download: Denim Social Holiday Content Calendar

Above all else, social selling content should be personal, authentic, and tailored to both the community an institution serves and the audience they hope to reach. An institution’s or intermediary’s  social outreach should illustrate not a provider-to-customer relationship but a human-to-human relationship — after all, people buy from people. As the marketer, it’ll be your responsibility to help intermediaries understand how to do this. But your efforts will pay off in your social metrics: Content shared by employees receives eight times the engagement of posts from brand pages.

Social Selling Examples + Success Stories

Watch: Social Sellers in the Wild 
Financial Institution Social Media Examples

Financial Institution Social Selling Case Studies

Evolve Bank & Trust

Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. Recognizing the importance of social media in their overall marketing strategy, the team came to Denim Social to improve social media performance metrics across their brand, local Home Loan Centers and individual Home Loan Consultant and Advisor Facebook pages.

Like so many financial institutions, Evolve had begun organic social media efforts, but lacked sufficient resources to scale a robust social media strategy that drove meaningful results.

Denim Social helped Evolve activate HLC Facebook pages over the course of just a few months. But page launches were just the beginning of our full-service onboarding. Denim Social’s dedicated Customer Success team trained users on how to use (and make the most of) the Denim Social platform. Our social media experts provided content strategy guidance and curated content libraries made it easy for the Evolve team to post across numerous pages with limited resources.

Bolstered by stellar results in organic, Evolve continues to expand their strategy with paid social media. In addition to offering a platform that fully integrates organic social media management, Denim Social’s team also provides weekly strategy support. Paid social media continues to drive more likes, higher engagement and increased reach and impressions for Evolve.

“Our sales team wants to be selling, and they don’t want anything to get in the way of selling. With Denim Social they can schedule everything to post and the engage when the time is right. They can easily schedule content and get back to selling.” - Seth Reeks, Digital Marketing Coordinator at Evolve Bank & Trust

BOK Financial: Scaling Social to Deepen Community Connection

BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform. In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads. 

Geographically dispersed across midwest and southwest, BOK Financial saw an opportunity to use loan officer social media to build their regional presence and community relationships. Recognizing the potential in a local-focused strategy, BOK Financial wanted hyper-local custom content to inspire follower engagement

Sounds simple, right? Like many financial institutions, the team faced competition for internal priority and a lack of support resources. Further, many seasoned loan officers didn’t understand the power of social media or functionally how to grow their followings. “The marketing team knew social media was a huge opportunity to engage local communities,” said Tiffany VanZandt, social media manager. 

“We noticed that loan officers were hesitant to post because of their lack of experience using social media networks. Finding time to schedule posts and coming up with content ideas was challenging for them, too.” BOK Financial found success in a two-pronged strategy to fire up loan officers’ feeds and local community engagement:

Posting on Behalf of Mortgage Loan Officers + Rallying Loan Officers to Get Active on Social

Recognizing the schedule crunch for mortgage loan officers, BOK Financial leveraged regional administrative teams to consistently schedule regional, company and industry content on behalf of mortgage loan officers. With Denim Social as its social media management platform, one administrative team member could easily post on behalf of many mortgage loan officers, all while staying in compliance. Localized content libraries made it simple for the central marketing team to distribute regionally relevant content to mortgage loan officers. 

While marketing support went a long way to getting loan officers active on social media, the BOK Financial team knew loan officers still needed to understand the potential in social media and how to personalize their feeds with hyper-local individual posts. Regional teams established a regular market leader communication that shared content ideas, examples of monthly top producers posts and showcased positive client reviews.

“Denim Social has drastically improved social media results for our mortgage team. Before we had this platform, only a few [loan officers] were actively using social media for business but today we have much more interest as the platform makes it less intimidating.” - Tiffany VanZandt, Social Media Manager at BOK Financial

AnnieMac Home Mortgage: Streamlining Social Selling

AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. The team came to Denim Social looking to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers. With significant national reach and scale, the brand sought to produce consistent and compelling content for the field. Recognizing the value of social media, AnnieMac saw an opportunity to stand out in the hyper-competitive mortgage market. But AnnieMac’s top priority? Staying in compliance. With an eager and dispersed field of loan officers, the lender needed tools that would make compliance easy every step of the way

Denim Social helped AnnieMac activate Facebook pages for more than 200 team members in just four months. The full scope of the project eventually encompassed social selling pages for 175 loan officers and 47 branch-level brand pages across 25 states. Once the pages were live, Denim Social provided curated content to fuel the social selling strategy. Denim Social set-up loan officers with success through customized training and today, still provides monthly new user trainings for the growing group of social-savvy loan officers. 

With a deeply-integrated social strategy that activates at the brand, branch and loan officer levels, AnnieMac is driving significant results. In its first year, the AnnieMac brand Facebook audience increased its social following by more than 11% and followers are engaging with its social media content more than ever before. The Denim Social platform has empowered AnnieMac to unlock the power of social selling and followers are noticing. 

Every post whether from the brand, branches or loan officers is compliance approved, significantly reducing risk. What’s more, AnnieMac reports an anecdotal “compliance by osmosis” effect. Thanks to the tools provided by Denim Social, employees and loan officers are continually learning what does and doesn’t meet compliance standards. 

“Denim Social has allowed me to efficiently and effectively manage multiple social media channels. I no longer have to spend hours researching and creating posts that are relevant to my followers. With Denim Social, it now only takes a few minutes to have a month’s worth of fresh content that is inspiring, timely and informational.” - Alexis Zwiesler, Branch Marketing Assistant at AnnieMac

Download: How Six Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media

What are other financial institutions looking like on social media? 

Your Social Selling Future is Bright

Unlimited Measures of Success

Your measures can evolve over time to include top performing agencies, agency highlights, highest performing content (based on engagement or adoption)

Ongoing Education

Consider hosting regular internal webinars on best practices, how to optimize content, how to start using paid advertising, and agency highlights and more. 

Merchandise Success Internally

Invite a social top performer to share relevant, real-life stories on how social has helped them grow their businesses and build and foster relationships

Drive Adoption 

Check in, check in, check in!  Set up regular check ins with your social sellers to make sure they’re seeing the value and keeping up with posting and responding to their audiences. 

Fuel Success with Content

Include intermediary content in your brand content planning. Start simple by tweaking your brand posts to sound like they’re coming from the voice of the agent.

Measure Your Success

Start small! Sometimes this just means basic adoption of your program. Are agents using it? Are their platforms connected to the technology you’ve invested in? Are they posting?

Download: Social Media Analytics Enhance Your Financial Institution’s Marketing Strategy

As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. While the “spray-and-pray” approach may have worked a decade ago, consumer

expectations for personalized experiences and C-suite demands for measurable results have raised the bar to a whole new level.

The good news is every social media post you publish is generating meaningful data about the audiences you are trying to connect with and convert. Indeed, social media marketing can have a huge reach — 83% of people say they discover new products on Instagram, and 54% of Gen Z say social media is their top influence channel. With the personal networks offered on the organic side and the advanced targeting of paid ads, social media is tough to beat as a customer acquisition tool.

Why is it, then, that so many digital marketers feel uncomfortable evaluating metrics and measuring ROI in social media marketing? Well, for starters, all the social media data in the world means nothing if you can’t transform it into meaningful insights in relation to business objectives.

Identifying meaningful insights around business objectives begins with setting specific, measurable goals for your campaigns. A great place to start is with your customers. You can easily develop goals when you ask questions like these:

  • Which of my customer segments am I most likely to reach on social media?
  • What types of content and experiences will resonate with them?
  • What motivates them and makes them tick?

With questions like these in mind, it’s easier to know what data to collect and how to begin analyzing it to make meaningful decisions. 

1. Efficiency

Social media measurement in itself is nearly impossible to do manually. If you’re trying to get telling analytics with a spreadsheet, you won’t have much luck. Social media measurement, like most analytics, requires the right tools.

Quantify the time you spend on measurement to appeal to management. The right analytics tools can help you collect valuable marketing data faster and easier. Data shows that simplifying workflows with technology can free up 20–30% of employees’ time, so show leadership that with the right tools, you can up your efficiency to do more faster.

Another reason leaders might shy away from the idea of a robust social media marketing strategy is compliance. Financial services is a heavily regulated industry, and electronic communication is certainly not exempt from regulatory scrutiny. Again, the right tools can help. Denim Social’s platform, for example, enables marketers to keep social media compliant in an efficient way. Among other compliance features, the platform automates approval workflows so the right people can sign off on the right social content with ease before it ever goes live.‍

2. Targeting‍

As algorithms change and organic social media is no longer a promising strategy on its own, marketers need to persuade leadership teams to invest in paid social media. Not only will paid get your messages in front of the right people with direct targeting capabilities, but it can also provide more data to help you understand what your target audience groups want and need.

By tracking paid performance by target audience group, you can better understand who’s connecting with what content and hone your social media strategy to connect with more prospects. Show leadership teams that when every message lands in front of exactly the right people, you’re maximizing social media marketing budget dollars — instead of wasting them on irrelevant or unengaged audiences.

3. Competitor tracking‍

Help leaders understand that, while measuring your own social media performance offers valuable insights, measuring your competitors’ performance can take your marketing game to the next level.

With social listening tools that enable you to track competitors’ social media activity, leaders can see your organization’s performance benchmarked against competitors and get a clear picture of where social needs more investment to stay competitive.

What’s more, social listening tools offer financial institutions a clear line of sight into how other brands are resonating with customers and encouraging engagement on social. Your brand can use those insights to craft even more relevant messaging and keep a leg up on the competition at all times.‍

4. Conversion opportunities‍

Landing page linking strategies on social media drive conversions, and nothing is more compelling to a leadership team than a direct line from marketing spend to sales. Track form completion rates to present a clear picture of how many viewers have deemed your content valuable enough to exchange their information for. Then, tie that to sales data to see how many prospects who submitted their information and received follow-ups from sales teams eventually signed on.

When you can draw that clear line from social post all the way to conversion, the bottom-line impact is clear to see. Compare that to traditional marketing tactics — has your leadership team ever seen a recorded, data-backed customer conversion metric from a billboard? Not likely.

Marketers know that staying relevant in today’s digital world requires a strong approach to social media marketing. Show leaders how upping efficiency, performance metrics, and competitive insight can empower your marketing team to elevate a data-driven social media strategy that delivers clear, measurable results.

Most of all, remember, you can do it! However, you don’t have to go it alone; we can help!

We believe social media is a very powerful sales tool and want to help you make social selling easy for your organization to implement.

Ready to learn more? Book a demo today. 

Your financial institution, loan officers, bankers, agents, or advisors have spent a lot of time and effort building a robust social selling program, driving brand and associate presence, and establishing a good flow between marketing, compliance, and sales. Then comes the announcement that your organization will be going through a merger or an acquisition. Now what?

While it can at first seem like the hard work that was put into your social selling strategy was wasted, there are measures you can take to preserve the progress in social media marketing you’ve made and set your institution up for success both during and after a transition.

Digital transformation is one of the leading drivers of M&A activity and social selling can help your institution stay ahead. The industry shows no signs of slowing down, so banks, investment and wealth management firms, DBAs and others, will be faced with more uncertainty and opportunity for M&A activity in the future.

So, how to prepare and sustain a social selling program during transition? Start with these steps to create a foundation in your digital marketing strategy that will weather any change.  

  1. Be open and flexible as organizational shifts occur. Understanding what is changing and how it impacts various departments will make preserving or updating strategies more efficient. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and advocate for your social selling program as you navigate a new company environment.
  1. Document your social selling program. When you're in the thick of day-to-day marketing activity, it's easy to skip documenting the key tenets of the program you've designed. Take the opportunity to get down on paper the stakeholders involved, the strategy in use, the outcomes expected, etc. so it's easy to advocate for resources.
  2. Establish regular communication between compliance, marketing, and leadership. Get buy-in early and often from other departments. Sales should know why social selling is important to business, and legal and social media compliance should oversee that they are doing social selling safely. Progress and outcomes of the program should be made easily available, and setting regular meetings to keep everyone in the loop will make any transitions much easier and more adaptable.
  3. Be prepared to show records of all social media activity and history. Where there is a merger or acquisition, there is sure to be an audit. Keeping your strategy, your posts, and user information all in one place that can be easily accessed will give credibility to your social selling program and build trust with any new leadership. When users post through a platform, it is a quick fix to pull any needed information for compliance purposes.
  4. Get your budget in order. While budgets for marketing departments tend to be increasing, especially for social media, being faced with a merger might necessitate some budget rebalancing. Adopting a social selling strategy increases the value of your efforts, and multiplies what a brand can do alone, making it a budget-friendly approach.
  5. Track performance. Having a solid grasp of social media ROI and social selling analytics can inform how to present a budget to leadership and make the most of what is available. With insight from analytics, you can prove to the company that output on social media is resulting in input from new business. And remember, frontline employee engagement in a program is a powerful metric to emphasize!

Throughout the merger and acquisition process, keep an open mind and expect changes. Having management on the same page while promoting and driving the social selling program will be instrumental to ongoing success. In the face of potential transitions, feel confident that your financial institution social media marketing can withstand the test of time by preparing now.  The right social media management tools can give you the confidence to successfully transition your program, while staying compliant. Ready to learn more? Talk to your customer success manager or book a demo with us today.

Forward-thinking marketers understand the power of social media at all stages of their marketing funnel. From awareness and consideration to loyalty and even advocacy, social and digital channels can and do inform purchase decisions. Financial institutions are catching on — more than 90% of the 50 largest banks are currently on Facebook, and 88% have active Twitter accounts — but being on social media doesn’t equate to a strong social media strategy. Today’s digital market requires an integrated strategy that meets target audiences throughout the buyer’s journey. This means investing in paid social campaigns alongside organic and driving deeper relationships with customers through social selling.

Sounds easy, right? While marketers may understand the strategies and costs associated with modern social success, senior decision makers may still need educating and persuading. That’s why it’s essential to be able to effectively communicate the benefits of integrated social media strategies. In addition to intangible benefits like building trust and humanizing your brand, both organic and paid social selling strategies offer metrics that enable marketers to prove value.

After all, people buy from people. So if you’re ready to advocate for an expanded social media strategy, start by asking yourself these questions. Not only will they help you decide on your strategic priorities, but they will also show you how to articulate the value of social media strategies to the people holding the budget strings. To prove the value of social media in financial services and get buy-in from senior leaders, marketers must ask themselves these questions:

Does Our Social Media Marketing Drive ROI?

Expanding a social media strategy often means increased spending — so you must be able to show decision makers the value of social. While financial marketers are already advocates — they know the power of paid social media efforts and have seen it in action — other leadership may not have that knowledge. It’s up to marketing teams to connect the dots on how their efforts are driving business results, and that means providing a strong argument based on metrics and concrete benefits.

Data tells a powerful story, so let it guide the conversation. And to further strengthen your case for expanded social media strategies, make sure to highlight these benefits:

• Targeting

While organic content is important, leaders must understand that it’s not enough to impact the bottom line without paid support. Paid social media gives more flexibility than organic content — you can target specific customer subsets, or even new audience bases, allowing for greater personalization and a higher ROI. It’s all about delivering relevant content to the right consumers at the right time.

• Feedback

Feedback may not always impact the bottom line, but social media itself does offer a direct line to consumers. With the lines of communication open, it becomes easier to listen and learn about their wants, needs, and interests. An open-ended post, for instance, can encourage comments, which provide qualitative feedback on any given topic. This will improve the trust in your institution; customers (and their followers!) will see the commitment to providing an ever-improving experience.

• Conversion

Social media is about more than likes: If you’re providing links on social media (and you should), you’re creating conversion opportunities. Direct consumers to a landing page — from there, you can collect lead information. All that’s left is a follow-up. If that landing page has a form, track completion rates. The icing on top? These interactions are all measurable. Prove value by comparing these metrics with traditional tactics. When did a leader ever see a recorded, data-backed conversion metric from a billboard?

• Efficiency

Measuring social media marketing ROI, like most analytics, requires technology — and the right technology, at that. Spreadsheets simply won’t cut it, and they’re not as accurate or efficient as the tools that fintech partners offer. That’s why the Denim Social platform was built with financial institutions in mind. Its analytics capabilities allow for a more efficient means of capturing results while also centralizing information. Data is readily available, which can simplify and improve the approval workflow. Improvements to the workflow process have been shown to free up 20% to 30% of employees’ time — so bring that statistic to decision makers to prove its necessity.

How Do You Use Social Media Analytics to Make Your Case?

Expanding marketing strategies means collecting more data, and that necessitates a robust social media management tool. Gathering data on any social media marketing campaign affords you the opportunity to measure its overall performance and gives you clear-cut evidence to support business measures related to those efforts.

Of course, data should be gathered based on specific criteria. Meaningful insights come from specific measurable goals related to your campaign and the goals of company decision makers. While the objectives of any social media strategy for financial services will vary from one institution to the next, any marketing effort can benefit from optimizing strategy through social media ROI metrics.

Use metrics to hone your messaging and audience. Every social media marketing post is a learning opportunity about what resonates with your audience. Analytics show what topics drive engagement, what calls to action inspire clicks, and so on. Then, fine-tune subsequent posts based on your findings. Mastering social is an iterative process. When speaking with upper management, highlight how this process delivers greater value over time by continuously evolving.

As you optimize your messaging, look to target audiences. Social media, and paid social in particular, allows you to target subsets of consumers. Vary your messaging and content, and you begin to understand what connects with whom. This allows you to maximize social media spend going forward — you’re not wasting time and effort putting messaging in front of an uninterested audience. When decision makers want to reach specific audiences, outline how putting money toward paid ad campaigns makes that happen.

When you’re looking at your own metrics, be sure to pay attention to where the customer journey is going. Failure to guide customers to a landing page and other lead-generating tools will lead to dead ends, which isn’t the best use of these channels. Trackable links and analytics help marketers recognize the best avenues for using social media posts to capture leads that translate into sales. If you aren’t effectively working toward leads, it’ll be difficult to defend the necessity of your budget.

Finally, don’t measure your ROI too soon. If you’re going to connect the value of social to your broader business objectives, you need to sync your measurement time with your sales cycle or risk misunderstanding (and likely underestimating) the impact of social. Help leadership understand that ROI isn’t a one-and-done and it’s not instantaneous. That way, you’re guiding their expectations to the bigger picture of what your social media strategy is doing.

Troves of data are available from social media channels, and you’ll need the right technology to organize the information and arrive at a set of objectives that align with your larger business goals. The right measurement tool can build the confidence digital marketers need to foster social media marketing ROI success.

What’s the Cost of Getting Social Media Compliance Wrong?

Social media compliance for financial institutions can feel challenging, especially today. SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has brought increased scrutiny to social media since his appointment, and it’s understandable for institutions to want to pull back efforts to mitigate compliance risks. Make sure your executives understand that this method loses more than they gain.

Consider that customers are increasingly using digital methods to meet financial needs. Can anyone afford to lose out on that audience base? You won’t reach new customers, and you’re losing valuable social selling opportunities with the ones you have. Social selling influences half of revenue for 14 major industries — and financial services is one of them.

Rather than scaling back social media efforts (and in the process, your revenue), work to mitigate compliance risks. When senior management airs concerns over compliance, counter with technology to automate compliance monitoring. Denim Social was built for compliance, so you can focus less on worrying if you’re compliant and more on fostering leads.

With Denim Social, you can use numerous tools that can help in ensuring:

• Protection. Problematic posts never see the light of day, as our platform not only establishes an approval workflow but also flags posts containing questionable keywords or phrases even before the review process.

• Education. Our platform can serve as an ongoing compliance education tool. Team members receive almost immediate feedback and can test the equipped filters to understand what might cause regulatory trouble.

• Enablement. Denim Social allows for the creation content libraries and curated, pre-approved posts. Team members can pull from these resources without the need for approvals, adding speed and efficiency to the process.

• Record-keeping. The potential of an audit hangs over every financial institution. Our platform archives all social media posts and interactions. It even does the same with comments. If regulators come knocking, you’ll have a report in no time.

• Notifications. Should a team member try to send a post through the approval process with a prohibited keyword or phrase, those flags send a notification directly to the individual. Employees quickly learn what can and cannot be posted.

• Profile locks. Rules can be built within the platform that can prevent team members from posting problematic content, helping to quell worries about social media compliance. The goal is to provide the controls necessary to avoid issues.

• Editing. Admins can edit or delete team members’ posts, comments, or direct messages right from the platform — across any connected social channel. In fact, the process is automated when prohibited keywords or phrases hit the network.

Social media compliance for financial institutions shouldn’t be more complicated than any other compliance for your operation. It all comes down to your choice of technology, and Denim Social has the experience and tools you need to make it a breeze.

What Do We Need in a Fintech Partner?

The social media marketing needs of financial institutions are unique. You’re not necessarily selling a product or a service but a relationship with a qualified professional, which calls for authenticity and empathy to establish a sense of trust. The tactics used by “traditional” brands simply aren’t as impactful in the financial services space.

Beyond that, social media compliance is complex. Without industry knowledge, it can be difficult for a marketing agency to navigate the nuances set by FINRA. Your fintech partner should fully appreciate the regulatory constraints and respect the concerns of your financial institution while still understanding how to drive real value with your social media strategy.

However, according to Cornerstone’s “What’s Going On In Banking 2021” report, financial institutions aren’t having much success finding these qualified and attentive partners, noting that FI “boards will tire of not seeing results [from fintech partnerships]." Executives are relying on your expertise to identify fintech partners with a proven ability to collaborate and create solutions. And because boards may be wary of partners, you must be able to outline exactly how that partner will help you reach your goals. Help executives understand these benefits.

• Customized onboarding.

Denim Social customizes our onboarding process to meet your specific needs, so executives know they’re getting an experience tailor-made for the company. No questions are left unanswered — we walk alongside you to always offer an explanation. On top of that, our team will help you craft the communication necessary to get employees to use the platform. Emails, messaging, toolkits, and more are available to encourage adoption, so upper-level management knows they’re investing in a tool that will see widespread use.

• Team training.

Depending on your size and needs, we provide kickoff and regular training to help team members make the most of the platform so that decision makers can rest easy knowing our software isn’t being underutilized. We can also provide train-the-trainer sessions to move training internal, and our recently launched Academy can help marketers become certified on our platform.

• Strategy consultation.

Our customer success team can help you identify tactics to move the needle on your social media strategy. Just ask, and we’ll provide best practices and industry-relevant comparisons to inform your tactics and optimize your social selling implementation.

• Content libraries.

We work directly with your institution and UpContent to ensure you can create a customized content library that matches the specific needs of your business and your customers.

In order to optimize a social media strategy, FI leaders and marketers must be able to sustain compliance at scale and understand social media measurement and analytics to see ROI. When you understand your metrics, you can bring that knowledge to decision makers, too. They’ll see the value you bring to the brand and associates (and match that value when it’s time to make budgets). Trusted fintech partners with dedicated customer success teams can help.

Bottom line: Social media is hard, but marketers don’t have to do it alone. With Denim Social, they have dedicated team members they can call to help.

Get in touch with us today to schedule a demo!

Denim Social is pleased to announce a new platform integration with American Bankers Association, which provides support and representation to banks of all sizes.

For financial services marketers, social media content curation can be tough. It is time-consuming, and compliance considerations can further complicate the need to produce interesting and timely content to customers. However, it’s an important aspect of any bank digital marketing strategy, with such a wide array of social media benefits for banks.

With this development, banks that are ABA members and Denim Social customers will be able to easily access social media content through this Shared Library. Bank marketers will be able to select from a wide range of content that can be shared at the brand, branch, or employee level. All resources will be relevant and compliant social media posts, thanks to Denim Social’s approval workflows.

When it comes to sharing content on social, it’s important to keep posts engaging and shareable, to help increase brand awareness and boost social selling efforts. ABA will keep content updated regularly, with evergreen, time-specific, and campaign-specific content. Even better, the ABA Shared Content Libraries can be built as often as needed, and users can quickly manage shared content and remove anything that is no longer relevant.

Here’s how it works:

  • The publisher accesses the Denim Social platform
  • The ABA creates and manages content in the shared library
  • All ABA members and Denim Social users can access and share the available content to their connected networks

This partnership makes it easier than ever to accelerate your bank’s messaging, manage social content in real time, stay compliant, and remain relevant. Denim Social has helped financial institutions see a 78% increase in engagement, a 2,000% increase in brand-level impressions, and an 874% increase in reach across networks. Empower your institution and strengthen your digital banking customer journey to create and publish social content at scale by booking a demo with Denim Social today. Already a Denim Social customer? Talk to your Customer Success representative to get started.


Financial institutions face a number of hurdles in digital marketing, including lack of digital-first strategy, higher brand purpose, and the tendency to “dabble in digital.” Social media compliance for financial institutions is also a pressing issue, with the nuances of regulatory constraints demanding strict scrutiny over all electronic communication.

But unless a financial institution has significant scale, it’s unlikely to have the in-house talent and resources needed to build successful digital marketing strategies and solutions from the ground up. Instead, financial institutions need qualified and attentive fintech partners who understand their challenges and bring pointed solutions to their problems. According to a recent Cornerstone Advisors report, however, many aren’t succeeding in finding such partners. The report predicts that financial institution boards will soon tire of not seeing adequate results from fintech vendors. So what’s the problem?

As The Financial Brand article linked above noted, financial marketers at organizations of all sizes “crave assistance” to help them navigate problems and achieve successful digital marketing strategies. They need fintechs with dedicated customer success teams to offer specific expertise and a customized approach to reach their digital marketing goals.  

Ensuring Digital Marketing Success in the Banking Industry

Denim Social’s approach is consultative and collaborative from the start. Our customer success team works with every partner to create unique pathways to success, and our platform itself was designed from the ground up to meet a specific need for compliance in the heavily regulated financial services industry.  

With the following steps, Denim Social tailors service to help each client develop successful digital marketing strategies:

1. Customize onboarding and workflow setups.

Onboarding is an important part of starting any new relationship with a vendor. To help you reach your goals, your partner must first thoroughly understand what those goals are and the pain points that prevent you from reaching them. At Denim Social, our customer success team digs in to understand each client’s unique goals and challenges.

Financial institutions also have different workflows and processes to account for with digital marketing software. For example, those in charge of signing off on social media posts before they go live could vary greatly from one organization to another. Denim Social’s platform allows clients to build automated approval workflows to ensure every post is compliant and aligned with brand messaging before it goes live, and our customer success team helps customize those workflows to get in front of exactly the right people at the right time.  

2. Drive software adoption across the organization.

If employees don’t use new software, there’s little chance your financial institution will see a high return on your technology investment. One of the most critical pieces of the software adoption puzzle is earning buy-in from employees. Denim Social helps marketers learn how to communicate the “what’s in it for me” knowledge to help get and keep teams on board to use new tools. We provide messaging, emails, tool kits, and more to drive software adoption within financial institutions.

3. Evaluate performance and strategy consistently.

Financial institution leaders need to know how their digital marketing strategies compare to competing institutions, so they require consistent performance evaluation and strategy consultation based on analytics. Regularly scheduled executive business reviews that go over all the metrics tied to their success plan and guidance working toward those outcomes are a must.

At Denim Social, our experts help financial institutions identify strategies to arrive at stated priorities, provide best practices for executing on goals, and offer industry-relevant comparisons to get a read on the business landscape. All of that is backed by performance analytics.

4. Provide training for the whole team.

Social selling, or the practice of having loan officers, financial advisors, and other employees connect with audiences through their own professional social media accounts, is an excellent way to humanize financial brands and expand reach. But it does require training these employees on how to work with your marketing team to develop and share posts. Digital marketing fintech platforms can make this collaboration easier, but not without properly setting employees up for success first.

That’s why Denim Social’s customer success team is dedicated to training your people to succeed on the platform. For smaller clients, we can provide this training directly to employees. For larger enterprise clients, we can educate leaders on how to hold trainings within their own teams. We also just launched our Academy to help marketers get certified on the platform and share that knowledge throughout their organizations.

5. Curate custom content.

Even with proper training on digital marketing platforms, curating the right content to share can still be an intimidating part for marketing teams and employees. What information are your customers looking for? What will pique their interest and drive them to connect further with your brand?

At Denim Social, our dedicated team builds in-depth and ongoing relationships with clients to understand what content is most important to them and resonates best with their audiences. Our platform also integrates with UpContent, a content curation industry leader, to add relevant articles from trusted third-party sources to client content libraries. This way, marketers or employees are never empty-handed when it comes to valuable content.

The rise of fintech is impossible to deny, but not every fintech partnership will be an asset to your company. Seek vendors like Denim Social that dig in to understand your needs, customize solutions, and track progress along the way. To learn more about our customer success team and consultative approach, get in touch today.


Digital-direct lenders have been staking out a larger and larger claim to the mortgage space. In 2019 alone, 58.9% of all U.S. mortgages originated from nonbank mortgage lenders. In 2020, that number jumped to 68.1%. People are increasingly adopting digital solutions, which is precisely what these lenders offer. They provide a fast and efficient means of securing a mortgage.

But speed and convenience aren’t everything, and traditional lenders still have at least one ace in their back pockets. Digital-direct lenders can’t establish human relationships like traditional mortgage loan officers can. Lenders will find their competitive advantage by building genuine connections and nurturing relationships over time.

With more than three-fourths of borrowers moving forward with the first lender they speak to, being the first in front of them to make an initial connection is the key to securing more mortgage business over time. In today’s increasingly digital world, social media is where loan officers can meet customers where they are and continue maintaining those relationships.

Mortgage marketers looking to make the most of their human resources and move the needle on deals closed will need a solid social media mortgage marketing strategy — one built on a path to scalability. The first step is creating a social media content plan.

Developing a Social Media Content Plan

Mortgage marketers need to activate loan officers on social media. Employee personal accounts have greater reach than brand pages alone, and consumers see posts from individuals as more authentic and trustworthy than those from companies.

Loan officers, however, aren’t marketers, and they’re busier than ever, as interest rates have been at historic lows. In other words, loan officers need support with their mortgage marketing efforts to execute social selling programs strategically.

Enter the social media content plan to detail when and what mortgage loan officers will post.

Consistency is critical with social media for mortgage loan officers. The post frequency you outline in your social media content plan will vary based on your resources and team, but Denim Social’s recent benchmark report can give you a good idea of how often your competitors are posting to get you started.

When it comes to the right content to include in your plan, social media marketing for mortgage loan officers should include the right mix of educational information, personalized posts, and promotional content. Denim Social’s platform can create curated content libraries from trusted third-party news sources, taking the time and effort of sourcing educational material out of loan officers’ and marketers’ hands.

Keep promotional content to a minimum, and when loan officers do share these types of posts, make them helpful and meaningful. Linking to personalized landing pages from promotional posts to guide prospects to the information they want and need is a great way to drive more value from social media.

Of course, educational and promotional content developed and scheduled by marketers and posted by loan officers only has so much power. Remember, the point of social media marketing for loan officers is to get the human element front and center. People prefer doing business with people, so loan officers should also be developing their own posts to showcase their distinct personalities, make connections, and build and strengthen customer relationships. For example, loan officers could share photos of closings or videos from community events.

While the right social media content plan and management tools will make social selling quick and easy for loan officers and marketers alike, marketers will still need to provide loan officers with some guidance. Social media training for loan officers will ensure every post is effective and compliant.

Social Media Training Tips

The average age of mortgage loan officers is 47, so chances are most members of your team aren’t digital natives. This doesn’t mean they’ll be opposed to learning or using social media, but social media training can help them get comfortable with platforms and use social strategies to their fullest potential.

While social media training programs won’t look the same for every organization, they should all explain the opportunity behind social selling and highlight the importance of consistent posting to build genuine connections. Share information about what social media marketing for mortgage loan officers can do to build brand awareness and generate leads. According to LinkedIn data, salespeople who maintain an active social media presence are 57% more like to generate leads and 45% more likely to reach quota than those who post less frequently. Considering that the average borrower purchases 11 mortgages in their lifetime, a strong social media presence can do wonders for securing business.

From there, explain why it’s essential to keep a consistent social media presence — but be sure to highlight how doing so won’t be a burden for loan officers. If loan officers don’t post regularly, social media platform algorithms may bury posts in users’ feeds and cause loan officers to drop off borrowers’ radars. But marketers can develop thoughtful social media content plans and schedule posts in advance to alleviate the pressure on loan officers to post frequently.

Marketers can handle educational and promotional posts, but loan officers do still need to add their own touch with personal content. Of course, electronic communication, including social media, is heavily regulated in financial services. Loan officers might be hesitant to create posts on their own due to social media compliance concerns. Marketers can ease their worries by assuring them that no post will go live without proper approval. Denim Social’s automatic approval workflow will get every post in front of the right people for appropriate review and sign-off.

Scaling Your Social Selling Tactics

For marketers overseeing hundreds or thousands of loan officers on social media, the idea of scaling effective and compliant social selling strategies can seem daunting or even impossible, especially if you’re still juggling different spreadsheets for login and posting information. If that sounds like you, you’re in luck: Denim Social enables you to post on various platforms from hundreds of loan officers’ profiles in just a few clicks — all from one easily-accessible dashboard.

Denim Social can also help marketers scale compliance oversight. Whereas many social media management tools are aimed at consumer brands and small businesses that don’t have to worry about regulatory concerns, Denim Social’s platform has been designed specifically with financial institutions’ needs in mind — including compliance. Along with preapproved content libraries and automated approval workflows, the platform also enables marketers to filter for keywords that could raise compliance concerns to flag potentially problematic content before it makes it to the approval step, eliminating approval process bottlenecks. These elements allow mortgage marketers to scale compliance across every loan officers’ social media strategy with ease.

Scaling compliant educational, personal, and limited promotional posts for loan officers is crucial for social media mortgage marketing, but it’s not the only important component to consider. Changing social media algorithms have made organic posts less visible over time. While these posts can still gain some traction, strategies that include paid social media advertising will deliver the most impact.

Paid Social Media Advertising

While organic content might be less impactful on its own than it once was, pairing it with paid social media advertising can bring in significant returns. Marketers can target paid posts to show up in front of the right people at the right times. For example, a loan officer looking to secure more first-time mortgage business could target recent college graduates in the local community with educational, informative posts about buying their first home.

And just like with organic posts, marketers can pull off compliant and effective paid social media advertising at scale with Denim Social. Our social media management tool combines both organic and paid into one platform to streamline your planning and oversight efforts.

Today, an effective mortgage marketing strategy for traditional lenders looks like using social media to create and maintain relationships between loan officers and customers. Thoughtful social media content plans, social media training for loan officers, and the tools to scale efforts across as many loan officers as possible will bring impressive returns. It might seem like a massive effort at first, but the right technology partners can get your social media mortgage marketing strategy up and running quickly to drive results in no time. Schedule a demo with Denim Social to see how we can work for you.


Connect & Convert on Social

Successfully scale conversion optimized campaigns across all social media channels with built-in compliance, publishing tools, and more.
Book a Demo
GUIDES

What’s the Cost of Getting Social Media Compliance Wrong?

Increasingly, customers are turning to digital providers for their financial needs — traditional lenders have dropped to only 21% of mortgage sales today. But even the highest-quality AI software can’t offer the basic building blocks of trust: guidance, reassurance, customization, and empathy.

That’s why capitalizing on the human experience and fostering genuine human interaction through social selling is key for traditional FIs to stay ahead. The trick, however, is doing it compliantly.

Compliance missteps can cause serious damage. In early 2021, for example, MassMutual received a hefty $4.75 million penalty for not ensuring its agents followed social media compliance regulations. This might be an extreme example, but any financial institution can still land in hot water if it fails to maintain FINRA-compliant digital communications. It’s vital to put compliance at the forefront of any financial institution’s social selling strategy.

Social Media Compliance for Financial Institutions From Denim Social

Denim Social is a social media compliance-first experience, as compliance is the thread that runs through our programming rather than an add-on or patch. Our tools are fully integrated to give a reliable, easy-to-use experience for financial services marketers. For this reason, financial institutions can feel safe relying on our software to help them meet their social selling goals.

How does Denim Social serve financial institutions interested in keeping up with compliance rules and regulations?

1. We offer protection.

The best way to ensure compliance is by finding and flagging potential content issues before any of it goes live on a site. Our workflows make sure the right eyes view and approve each post before publishing.

Keyword filtering flags problematic words or phrases ahead of time. And when team members try to use any restricted keywords, employees will immediately be notified of the issue — whether the content is a post, comment, or even a DM. Over time, your employees will begin to recognize restricted phrases even before the system notification appears. If there’s ever a need for damage control, Denim Social’s newest tools let administrators edit or delete users’ online messages. It can also prevent posts to out-of-compliance social networks altogether.

2. We provide constant training on social compliance.

Many of our users say the Denim Social platform offers ongoing compliance education. Your team members learn by osmosis as they test filters and receive feedback from Compliance, which continually educates your team and builds an ongoing culture of compliance among them. As they see what posts are approved versus unapproved, they receive real-time social media compliance education.

3. We curate content streams.

Using our enablement tool, teams can create libraries of preapproved content to keep employees’ social feeds full without additional approvals or workflow submissions. And if curating a full library of content on your own sounds daunting, you’re in luck. Our partnership with UpContent provides content sourcing with curated third-party content from hundreds of thousands of trusted publishers. You can optimize your time with “hands-free” curation around the clock.

This process streamlining will help your financial institution and employees build up a reputation for continuous social media use and allow you to turn your focus to vetting more personalized content. Trust that the curated content streams keep the lights on while you reach the 71% of consumers who expect personalized experiences.

4. We keep your records neat and organized.

Audits can happen at any time. Hopefully, you’ve moved past binders, but even if you’re keeping a spreadsheet of social posts, it’s not adequate or efficient for creating scalable, compliant social strategies. With our record-keeping tool, we automatically archive every post, comment, and like in our system, allowing you to easily find and share reports as needed for auditing. As you scale, it won’t be possible for a human on your team to capture everything. This is an essential protection for future audits and allows you to put your energies toward tasks other than record-keeping.

The importance of social media marketing for financial institutions is growing exponentially. So is the need for social media marketing tools that can keep up with compliance needs and ever-changing FINRA rules and expectations. If your financial institution is ready to dive into social selling but you’re concerned about remaining compliant, talk to Denim Social.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Download Guide
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
ALL GUIDES:

Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.

When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.

Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.

Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.

Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.

It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.

This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.

It’s called social selling and it works.

The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.

As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.

Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.

Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.

BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.

In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.

As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.

Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.

Download Here

Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.

Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.

To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.

The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.

In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.

As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.

It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:

  • Scale your social selling program
  • Plan your content strategy
  • Train your loan officers

AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.

Instant Download

Find out how more than 400 financial institutions across asset classes, geographies, and more used social media in 2020 to effectively support their business objectives. We’ve also outlined key trends to inform your social media future.

As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.

So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.

Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.

Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves

Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!

Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

  • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
  • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
  • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:

  • Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
  • How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
  • What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?

In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.

Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

  • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
  • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
  • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves

Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!

Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram

Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.

How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media

Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.

Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.

Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:

  • Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
  • Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
  • Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
  • Build trust within the community

Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:

  • Who does what
  • The right structure to execute strategy
  • How compliance software can help

Enjoy!

Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

  • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
  • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
  • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media

See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:

  • Is it important to equip your sales personnel with social media accounts?
  • Does your bank measure the impact of your social media use?
  • COVID-19 & Bank Social Media

    Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.

    Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.

    GUIDES

    What’s the Cost of Getting Social Media Compliance Wrong?

    Increasingly, customers are turning to digital providers for their financial needs — traditional lenders have dropped to only 21% of mortgage sales today. But even the highest-quality AI software can’t offer the basic building blocks of trust: guidance, reassurance, customization, and empathy.

    That’s why capitalizing on the human experience and fostering genuine human interaction through social selling is key for traditional FIs to stay ahead. The trick, however, is doing it compliantly.

    Compliance missteps can cause serious damage. In early 2021, for example, MassMutual received a hefty $4.75 million penalty for not ensuring its agents followed social media compliance regulations. This might be an extreme example, but any financial institution can still land in hot water if it fails to maintain FINRA-compliant digital communications. It’s vital to put compliance at the forefront of any financial institution’s social selling strategy.

    Social Media Compliance for Financial Institutions From Denim Social

    Denim Social is a social media compliance-first experience, as compliance is the thread that runs through our programming rather than an add-on or patch. Our tools are fully integrated to give a reliable, easy-to-use experience for financial services marketers. For this reason, financial institutions can feel safe relying on our software to help them meet their social selling goals.

    How does Denim Social serve financial institutions interested in keeping up with compliance rules and regulations?

    1. We offer protection.

    The best way to ensure compliance is by finding and flagging potential content issues before any of it goes live on a site. Our workflows make sure the right eyes view and approve each post before publishing.

    Keyword filtering flags problematic words or phrases ahead of time. And when team members try to use any restricted keywords, employees will immediately be notified of the issue — whether the content is a post, comment, or even a DM. Over time, your employees will begin to recognize restricted phrases even before the system notification appears. If there’s ever a need for damage control, Denim Social’s newest tools let administrators edit or delete users’ online messages. It can also prevent posts to out-of-compliance social networks altogether.

    2. We provide constant training on social compliance.

    Many of our users say the Denim Social platform offers ongoing compliance education. Your team members learn by osmosis as they test filters and receive feedback from Compliance, which continually educates your team and builds an ongoing culture of compliance among them. As they see what posts are approved versus unapproved, they receive real-time social media compliance education.

    3. We curate content streams.

    Using our enablement tool, teams can create libraries of preapproved content to keep employees’ social feeds full without additional approvals or workflow submissions. And if curating a full library of content on your own sounds daunting, you’re in luck. Our partnership with UpContent provides content sourcing with curated third-party content from hundreds of thousands of trusted publishers. You can optimize your time with “hands-free” curation around the clock.

    This process streamlining will help your financial institution and employees build up a reputation for continuous social media use and allow you to turn your focus to vetting more personalized content. Trust that the curated content streams keep the lights on while you reach the 71% of consumers who expect personalized experiences.

    4. We keep your records neat and organized.

    Audits can happen at any time. Hopefully, you’ve moved past binders, but even if you’re keeping a spreadsheet of social posts, it’s not adequate or efficient for creating scalable, compliant social strategies. With our record-keeping tool, we automatically archive every post, comment, and like in our system, allowing you to easily find and share reports as needed for auditing. As you scale, it won’t be possible for a human on your team to capture everything. This is an essential protection for future audits and allows you to put your energies toward tasks other than record-keeping.

    The importance of social media marketing for financial institutions is growing exponentially. So is the need for social media marketing tools that can keep up with compliance needs and ever-changing FINRA rules and expectations. If your financial institution is ready to dive into social selling but you’re concerned about remaining compliant, talk to Denim Social.

    Download the Guide

    Thank you! Your submission has been received!
    Download Guide
    Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
    Download Guide
    ALL GUIDES:

    Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.

    When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.

    Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.

    Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.

    Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.

    It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.

    This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.

    It’s called social selling and it works.

    The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.

    As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.

    Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.

    Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.

    BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.

    In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.

    As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.

    Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.

    Download Here

    Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.

    Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.

    To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.

    The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.

    In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.

    As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.

    It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:

    • Scale your social selling program
    • Plan your content strategy
    • Train your loan officers

    AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.

    Instant Download

    Find out how more than 400 financial institutions across asset classes, geographies, and more used social media in 2020 to effectively support their business objectives. We’ve also outlined key trends to inform your social media future.

    As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.

    So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.

    Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.

    Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves

    Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!

    Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

    • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
    • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
    • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

    Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:

    • Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
    • How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
    • What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?

    In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.

    Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

    • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
    • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
    • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

    Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves

    Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!

    Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram

    Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.

    How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media

    Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.

    Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.

    Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:

    • Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
    • Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
    • Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
    • Build trust within the community

    Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:

    • Who does what
    • The right structure to execute strategy
    • How compliance software can help

    Enjoy!

    Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

    • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
    • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
    • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

    ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media

    See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:

  • Is it important to equip your sales personnel with social media accounts?
  • Does your bank measure the impact of your social media use?
  • COVID-19 & Bank Social Media

    Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.

    Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.

    GUIDES

    What’s the Cost of Getting Social Media Compliance Wrong?

    Increasingly, customers are turning to digital providers for their financial needs — traditional lenders have dropped to only 21% of mortgage sales today. But even the highest-quality AI software can’t offer the basic building blocks of trust: guidance, reassurance, customization, and empathy.

    That’s why capitalizing on the human experience and fostering genuine human interaction through social selling is key for traditional FIs to stay ahead. The trick, however, is doing it compliantly.

    Compliance missteps can cause serious damage. In early 2021, for example, MassMutual received a hefty $4.75 million penalty for not ensuring its agents followed social media compliance regulations. This might be an extreme example, but any financial institution can still land in hot water if it fails to maintain FINRA-compliant digital communications. It’s vital to put compliance at the forefront of any financial institution’s social selling strategy.

    Social Media Compliance for Financial Institutions From Denim Social

    Denim Social is a social media compliance-first experience, as compliance is the thread that runs through our programming rather than an add-on or patch. Our tools are fully integrated to give a reliable, easy-to-use experience for financial services marketers. For this reason, financial institutions can feel safe relying on our software to help them meet their social selling goals.

    How does Denim Social serve financial institutions interested in keeping up with compliance rules and regulations?

    1. We offer protection.

    The best way to ensure compliance is by finding and flagging potential content issues before any of it goes live on a site. Our workflows make sure the right eyes view and approve each post before publishing.

    Keyword filtering flags problematic words or phrases ahead of time. And when team members try to use any restricted keywords, employees will immediately be notified of the issue — whether the content is a post, comment, or even a DM. Over time, your employees will begin to recognize restricted phrases even before the system notification appears. If there’s ever a need for damage control, Denim Social’s newest tools let administrators edit or delete users’ online messages. It can also prevent posts to out-of-compliance social networks altogether.

    2. We provide constant training on social compliance.

    Many of our users say the Denim Social platform offers ongoing compliance education. Your team members learn by osmosis as they test filters and receive feedback from Compliance, which continually educates your team and builds an ongoing culture of compliance among them. As they see what posts are approved versus unapproved, they receive real-time social media compliance education.

    3. We curate content streams.

    Using our enablement tool, teams can create libraries of preapproved content to keep employees’ social feeds full without additional approvals or workflow submissions. And if curating a full library of content on your own sounds daunting, you’re in luck. Our partnership with UpContent provides content sourcing with curated third-party content from hundreds of thousands of trusted publishers. You can optimize your time with “hands-free” curation around the clock.

    This process streamlining will help your financial institution and employees build up a reputation for continuous social media use and allow you to turn your focus to vetting more personalized content. Trust that the curated content streams keep the lights on while you reach the 71% of consumers who expect personalized experiences.

    4. We keep your records neat and organized.

    Audits can happen at any time. Hopefully, you’ve moved past binders, but even if you’re keeping a spreadsheet of social posts, it’s not adequate or efficient for creating scalable, compliant social strategies. With our record-keeping tool, we automatically archive every post, comment, and like in our system, allowing you to easily find and share reports as needed for auditing. As you scale, it won’t be possible for a human on your team to capture everything. This is an essential protection for future audits and allows you to put your energies toward tasks other than record-keeping.

    The importance of social media marketing for financial institutions is growing exponentially. So is the need for social media marketing tools that can keep up with compliance needs and ever-changing FINRA rules and expectations. If your financial institution is ready to dive into social selling but you’re concerned about remaining compliant, talk to Denim Social.

    Download the Guide

    Thank you! Your submission has been received!
    Download Guide
    Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
    Download Guide
    ALL GUIDES:

    Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.

    When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.

    Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.

    Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.

    Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.

    It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.

    This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.

    It’s called social selling and it works.

    The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.

    As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.

    Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.

    Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.

    BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.

    In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.

    As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.

    Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.

    Download Here

    Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.

    Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.

    To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.

    The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.

    In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.

    As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.

    It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:

    • Scale your social selling program
    • Plan your content strategy
    • Train your loan officers

    AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.

    Instant Download

    Find out how more than 400 financial institutions across asset classes, geographies, and more used social media in 2020 to effectively support their business objectives. We’ve also outlined key trends to inform your social media future.

    As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.

    So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.

    Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.

    Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves

    Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!

    Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

    • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
    • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
    • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

    Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:

    • Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
    • How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
    • What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?

    In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.

    Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

    • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
    • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
    • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

    Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves

    Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!

    Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram

    Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.

    How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media

    Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.

    Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.

    Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:

    • Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
    • Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
    • Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
    • Build trust within the community

    Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:

    • Who does what
    • The right structure to execute strategy
    • How compliance software can help

    Enjoy!

    Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

    • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
    • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
    • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

    ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media

    See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:

  • Is it important to equip your sales personnel with social media accounts?
  • Does your bank measure the impact of your social media use?
  • COVID-19 & Bank Social Media

    Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.

    Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.

    GUIDES

    What’s the Cost of Getting Social Media Compliance Wrong?

    Increasingly, customers are turning to digital providers for their financial needs — traditional lenders have dropped to only 21% of mortgage sales today. But even the highest-quality AI software can’t offer the basic building blocks of trust: guidance, reassurance, customization, and empathy.

    That’s why capitalizing on the human experience and fostering genuine human interaction through social selling is key for traditional FIs to stay ahead. The trick, however, is doing it compliantly.

    Compliance missteps can cause serious damage. In early 2021, for example, MassMutual received a hefty $4.75 million penalty for not ensuring its agents followed social media compliance regulations. This might be an extreme example, but any financial institution can still land in hot water if it fails to maintain FINRA-compliant digital communications. It’s vital to put compliance at the forefront of any financial institution’s social selling strategy.

    Social Media Compliance for Financial Institutions From Denim Social

    Denim Social is a social media compliance-first experience, as compliance is the thread that runs through our programming rather than an add-on or patch. Our tools are fully integrated to give a reliable, easy-to-use experience for financial services marketers. For this reason, financial institutions can feel safe relying on our software to help them meet their social selling goals.

    How does Denim Social serve financial institutions interested in keeping up with compliance rules and regulations?

    1. We offer protection.

    The best way to ensure compliance is by finding and flagging potential content issues before any of it goes live on a site. Our workflows make sure the right eyes view and approve each post before publishing.

    Keyword filtering flags problematic words or phrases ahead of time. And when team members try to use any restricted keywords, employees will immediately be notified of the issue — whether the content is a post, comment, or even a DM. Over time, your employees will begin to recognize restricted phrases even before the system notification appears. If there’s ever a need for damage control, Denim Social’s newest tools let administrators edit or delete users’ online messages. It can also prevent posts to out-of-compliance social networks altogether.

    2. We provide constant training on social compliance.

    Many of our users say the Denim Social platform offers ongoing compliance education. Your team members learn by osmosis as they test filters and receive feedback from Compliance, which continually educates your team and builds an ongoing culture of compliance among them. As they see what posts are approved versus unapproved, they receive real-time social media compliance education.

    3. We curate content streams.

    Using our enablement tool, teams can create libraries of preapproved content to keep employees’ social feeds full without additional approvals or workflow submissions. And if curating a full library of content on your own sounds daunting, you’re in luck. Our partnership with UpContent provides content sourcing with curated third-party content from hundreds of thousands of trusted publishers. You can optimize your time with “hands-free” curation around the clock.

    This process streamlining will help your financial institution and employees build up a reputation for continuous social media use and allow you to turn your focus to vetting more personalized content. Trust that the curated content streams keep the lights on while you reach the 71% of consumers who expect personalized experiences.

    4. We keep your records neat and organized.

    Audits can happen at any time. Hopefully, you’ve moved past binders, but even if you’re keeping a spreadsheet of social posts, it’s not adequate or efficient for creating scalable, compliant social strategies. With our record-keeping tool, we automatically archive every post, comment, and like in our system, allowing you to easily find and share reports as needed for auditing. As you scale, it won’t be possible for a human on your team to capture everything. This is an essential protection for future audits and allows you to put your energies toward tasks other than record-keeping.

    The importance of social media marketing for financial institutions is growing exponentially. So is the need for social media marketing tools that can keep up with compliance needs and ever-changing FINRA rules and expectations. If your financial institution is ready to dive into social selling but you’re concerned about remaining compliant, talk to Denim Social.

    Download the Guide

    Thank you! Your submission has been received!
    Download Guide
    Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
    ALL GUIDES:

    Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.

    When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.

    Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.

    Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.

    Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.

    It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.

    This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.

    It’s called social selling and it works.

    The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.

    As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.

    Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.

    Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.

    BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.

    In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.

    As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.

    Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.

    Download Here

    Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.

    Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.

    To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.

    The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.

    In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.

    As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.

    It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:

    • Scale your social selling program
    • Plan your content strategy
    • Train your loan officers

    AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.

    Instant Download

    Find out how more than 400 financial institutions across asset classes, geographies, and more used social media in 2020 to effectively support their business objectives. We’ve also outlined key trends to inform your social media future.

    As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.

    So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.

    Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.

    Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves

    Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!

    Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

    • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
    • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
    • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

    Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:

    • Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
    • How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
    • What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?

    In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.

    Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

    • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
    • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
    • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

    Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves

    Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!

    Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram

    Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.

    How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media

    Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.

    Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.

    Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:

    • Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
    • Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
    • Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
    • Build trust within the community

    Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:

    • Who does what
    • The right structure to execute strategy
    • How compliance software can help

    Enjoy!

    Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:

    • Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
    • Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
    • Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results

    ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media

    See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:

  • Is it important to equip your sales personnel with social media accounts?
  • Does your bank measure the impact of your social media use?
  • COVID-19 & Bank Social Media

    Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.

    Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.

    RESOURCES

    NEWS
    March 15, 2022

    What’s the Cost of Getting Social Media Compliance Wrong?

    By
    Denim Social

    Increasingly, customers are turning to digital providers for their financial needs — traditional lenders have dropped to only 21% of mortgage sales today. But even the highest-quality AI software can’t offer the basic building blocks of trust: guidance, reassurance, customization, and empathy.

    That’s why capitalizing on the human experience and fostering genuine human interaction through social selling is key for traditional FIs to stay ahead. The trick, however, is doing it compliantly.

    Compliance missteps can cause serious damage. In early 2021, for example, MassMutual received a hefty $4.75 million penalty for not ensuring its agents followed social media compliance regulations. This might be an extreme example, but any financial institution can still land in hot water if it fails to maintain FINRA-compliant digital communications. It’s vital to put compliance at the forefront of any financial institution’s social selling strategy.

    Social Media Compliance for Financial Institutions From Denim Social

    Denim Social is a social media compliance-first experience, as compliance is the thread that runs through our programming rather than an add-on or patch. Our tools are fully integrated to give a reliable, easy-to-use experience for financial services marketers. For this reason, financial institutions can feel safe relying on our software to help them meet their social selling goals.

    How does Denim Social serve financial institutions interested in keeping up with compliance rules and regulations?

    1. We offer protection.

    The best way to ensure compliance is by finding and flagging potential content issues before any of it goes live on a site. Our workflows make sure the right eyes view and approve each post before publishing.

    Keyword filtering flags problematic words or phrases ahead of time. And when team members try to use any restricted keywords, employees will immediately be notified of the issue — whether the content is a post, comment, or even a DM. Over time, your employees will begin to recognize restricted phrases even before the system notification appears. If there’s ever a need for damage control, Denim Social’s newest tools let administrators edit or delete users’ online messages. It can also prevent posts to out-of-compliance social networks altogether.

    2. We provide constant training on social compliance.

    Many of our users say the Denim Social platform offers ongoing compliance education. Your team members learn by osmosis as they test filters and receive feedback from Compliance, which continually educates your team and builds an ongoing culture of compliance among them. As they see what posts are approved versus unapproved, they receive real-time social media compliance education.

    3. We curate content streams.

    Using our enablement tool, teams can create libraries of preapproved content to keep employees’ social feeds full without additional approvals or workflow submissions. And if curating a full library of content on your own sounds daunting, you’re in luck. Our partnership with UpContent provides content sourcing with curated third-party content from hundreds of thousands of trusted publishers. You can optimize your time with “hands-free” curation around the clock.

    This process streamlining will help your financial institution and employees build up a reputation for continuous social media use and allow you to turn your focus to vetting more personalized content. Trust that the curated content streams keep the lights on while you reach the 71% of consumers who expect personalized experiences.

    4. We keep your records neat and organized.

    Audits can happen at any time. Hopefully, you’ve moved past binders, but even if you’re keeping a spreadsheet of social posts, it’s not adequate or efficient for creating scalable, compliant social strategies. With our record-keeping tool, we automatically archive every post, comment, and like in our system, allowing you to easily find and share reports as needed for auditing. As you scale, it won’t be possible for a human on your team to capture everything. This is an essential protection for future audits and allows you to put your energies toward tasks other than record-keeping.

    The importance of social media marketing for financial institutions is growing exponentially. So is the need for social media marketing tools that can keep up with compliance needs and ever-changing FINRA rules and expectations. If your financial institution is ready to dive into social selling but you’re concerned about remaining compliant, talk to Denim Social.

    Subscribe to our newsletter and get the latest sent to your inbox.
    Thank you for subscribing!
    Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
    OTHER NEWS:

    Being responsible for your team’s social selling strategy can be daunting, especially if you don’t have a plan or support. We see it firsthand at Denim Social – without a meaningful strategy, users may not be eager (or downright resistant) to jump on a new platform. So, how are others getting their teams onboard? We learn a lot from our Denim Social customers to learn how they’re making it happen. Overall, we have observed four keys to adoption success.

    Activate a hybrid distribution approach.

    We find that teams that utilize a hybrid approach to posting have the most empowered associates. What does it look like in practice? This usually includes the marketing team posting brand content on behalf of associates, and associates scheduling out pre-approved industry content from a content library, plus sprinkling in their own personal content. And rest assured, that personal content still goes through approval workflows.  

    Build a robust content library.

    If you’re going to ask associates to post content, you’ve got to make it easy and compliant. Our platform offers content libraries filled with pre-approved posts. We see that when associates have lots of content to choose from, they post more frequently.

    It's a win-win for all: Compliance teams can be confident that they are managing any content that's being posted, marketing teams can provide support more readily and get more messaging across, and users can quickly build up a content calendar with engaging, customizable posts.

    Communicate the value of social media consistently.

    Your teams need to be able to answer the age old question, “what’s in it for me?” Your teams are busy and that means you need to help them see why spending their valuable time on social media is worth it.

    In a time when meeting customers where they are means being on social media, it's essential that intermediaries look to their networks to take advantage of existing connections and forming new ones. Social media is a highly visible and time-efficient way to strengthen important relationships. It's all about doing more with less!

    Train and Train Again

    Baking social media and Denim Social training into the onboarding process is a great way to introduce new and motivated associates to a fresh way to drive their business.  It is also important to keep social media top of mind for ALL associates. An ongoing training program outlining compliance/social policy, the value of social media and Denim Social is a must, whether it be monthly or quarterly. Marketing is not often top of mind for salespeople, so it is important to continuously educate them on how to get involved and optimize their strategies.  

    Many of our Denim Social customers set up trainings that include: monthly new hire social media and compliance training courses, Denim Social overviews, a monthly Denim Social refresher training, a Quarterly Strategy training, and ongoing 1:1 assistance for users. It's all about keeping social media top of mind and having easy access to resources.

    For many, these training programs are a well oiled machine, and keeps their social program growing by educating and informing users consistently.

    If you’re struggling with adoption, these strategies can help. And of course, persistence pays off.

    Social media is only as valuable as its users and that makes adoption key. If you’re struggling to motivate your team to hop on the social media bandwagon the right tools and support can make all the difference. If you want to learn more about how the Denim Social platform works, schedule a demo with us today.


    Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media. 

    When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect. 

    “Everyone wants a quick response, they want to be communicated with in the way they want it…speed and availability demands have created challenges that they have to be able to be everything to the customer in the way that they want it.” - Bryan Clarke, SVP

    With Denim Social, Dart Bank launched a formal social selling program for over 50 loan officers in just a few months. Dart Bank started by posting on behalf of their loan officers. Through regular training and education combined with access to compliant content libraries, loan officers have gained the confidence to start posting to their own pages. It was important for Dart Bank to build a strong foundation and enable their team to make social media more personalized. 

    See how they helped strengthen customer relationships in this Case Study.

    Where Are the Biggest Opportunities to Use Social Media in Financial Services?

    Denim Social's Guide To Social Selling For Financial Services shows that most financial professionals — 83% of those surveyed — have a social media presence. It’s a great place to start, but having a profile is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what benefits financial institutions can enjoy from social media. Smart financial marketers and their teams should be optimizing their social selling efforts on every network to get the most out of what social media has to offer.

    Customers are active in many other places online, so why not meet them there? After all, 79% of people look to social media for financial advice. By meeting customers where they are on the main 4 networks, financial institutions can stay top of mind and grow real, authentic connections. Let’s dive into what Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook have to offer and how financial services marketers can best use each platform.

    1. Instagram

    As far as major social media platforms in financial services go, Instagram tops the list. While many financial professionals might not at first think of the photographic and visual network as prime business territory, its popularity makes it an excellent place to strengthen real relationships. 

    Instagram is one of the best ways to get in front of younger audiences, which is a worthwhile goal, considering that many Millennial customers will likely be on the search for new financial services providers as Baby Boomers pass their wealth on to the next generations. What's more, 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business account and 80% use the platform to discover new products.


    Even better, getting started on Instagram is a breeze. Instagram ads also allow hyperlinks, so you can lead readers right from their feeds to your website with specific calls to action to learn more. Lead them to a personalized and well-designed landing page on your site, for instance, and you'll be drawing each follower who clicks through one big step closer to conversion.

    2. LinkedIn

    The majority of financial services providers already use LinkedIn, and there are many ways to make it perhaps the most successful social selling platform out of all the networks. Employees at institutions of all sizes and financial industries can use this professional network to cultivate thought leadership and educate their customers.

    For financial services marketers, a brand profile is a necessary starting point. Getting the most out of the platform, however, requires activating your employees in a social selling strategy. They can share relevant content, such as videos and published articles from trusted media outlets, as well as engage with customers and prospects one-on-one via direct messaging to establish themselves as experts and build trusting relationships. People want to engage with other people, not with general brand pages. It’s no wonder that employees on social media can garner 10x the engagement of brand pages alone.

    3. Twitter

    Like LinkedIn, Twitter is also a great place for agents, loan officers, and advisors to share their expertise. Understandably, financial services marketers might be intimidated by the fast-paced nature of the platform and fear they don’t have enough resources to keep up. However, with the proper social media management tools, maintaining compliant engagement on Twitter is totally possible — and worth it.

    One of the greatest benefits of social media marketing for financial services is the ability to provide more value to customers. Twitter makes this incredibly easy to do. Marketers can follow all relevant news media outlets and keep an eye out for any articles that might benefit their clients or prospects. For example, an explainer piece on recent changes in tax legislation may be helpful come tax season. Retweeting such helpful resources educates followers on financial topics and builds trust in the brand and its employees.

    There’s no single best social media platform for marketing. Each one has a unique opportunity to reach and engage current and future customers. If you’re already on social media, it’s time to level up your social media marketing strategy by diving into Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in more depth. No matter the size of your financial institution, extending your social media strategy to encompass these platforms can help grow your audience, build trust, and maintain solid customer relationships.

    Whether you love or loathe social media's infiltration into every element of our personal and professional lives, there's no denying that this powerful medium is never going away. Social networks are growing bigger and stronger by the day. Forward-thinking achievers in every industry understand this and have responded by leaning all the way into social selling.

    For the unaware, social selling is using social media to sell a product or service by showcasing authenticity, strengthening relationships with clients and prospects, and building thought leadership. In social selling, advisors use their own social pages to promote content about their brand and services, but with a personal spin.

    Everyone from dog groomers to financial advisors are utilizing multiple social networks to build a following and bolster their personal brands, and those who fully embrace social media's ubiquity outperform their competitors and win more business. It's as simple as that.

    The key, though, is finding a way to stand out from the competition online. There's a big difference between "doing social media" and doing it well.

    The difficulty with differentiation

    As we all know, the internet is more than likely the first place individuals go to get advice these days — financial, familial, and absolutely everything in between. So when people go online to search for guidance on money matters, they won't find you if you aren't there, actively promoting your expertise and services.

    There's no stronger business case for social media (and social selling) than that: It's where your potential customers are. Meet them there and give them what they need. If you don't, someone else will.

    To set yourself apart as a financial advisor, you need to be able to sell yourself — not just your firm. Sure, many financial advisors are intermediated and you likely don't have free rein to post everything you might want to on social channels, but that shouldn't be a deal-breaker. There's still plenty to say without risking any backlash or drawing the ire of regulators.

    Put your fears aside

    Though some in the financial industry might feel wary or daunted by interacting directly with clients or prospects, online exchanges matter in today’s market. Brands that use a more generic social-media strategy can end up sounding too promotional, focused more on boosting the brand to a broad audience instead of forging real connections. Rather than creating original content that speaks to their particular audience, financial institutions treat these social channels as glorified billboards instead of networking opportunities for each individual advisor.

    That’s too bad because there’s real power behind social selling today. When comparing the social media potential of brands vs. individuals, one study found that employees have 10 times the reach and double the engagement of the brands they speak for. The best sellers in large companies, meanwhile, were the ones who regularly used technology to foster connections with new prospects or existing clients. Building genuine relationships pays off for both advisors and brands.

    So, how does someone improve their social-selling efforts? How can financial advisors use the power of their individuality to differentiate themselves from their peers? Here are five tips to help you better accomplish social selling on your personal pages:

    1. Ask an expert

    Even if you’re on board with tapping into the potential of authentic relationship-building through social selling, you still need the right tools and training for the job. After all, your area of expertise is in the valuable services you provide to your clients, not online marketing.

    An excellent move for advisors is to seek advice from your firms’s marketing or branding team. Not only can they help you develop an effective social-selling strategy, but they can also provide you with the resources and tools you need to more effectively and efficiently create, plan, and schedule your posts. Compliance experts can also educate you on the rules that govern social media in the financial services industry. Ideally, your firm provides continuous training and tools to ensure you stay on the right side of regulations.

    2. Be real

    The type of posts that most people see on their social-media feeds are at least partially determined by an algorithm. These algorithms are generally designed to serve up content that users are most likely to engage with in one way or another. This can be a huge advantage, but it also means that you can’t expect to stay on people’s minds if you deliver bland, uninteresting content that isn't relevant to your audience.

    That doesn’t mean you should go posting clickbait or try to shock people (there’s definitely such a thing as bad engagement). Instead, the best way to get and keep people’s attention is to be your real self. Post about what matters to you and do it in your own voice, not just copying/pasting brand posts. Post about local happenings that people in your area might care about. Speak to the challenges you hear clients ask about most. In social selling, authenticity is the fastest way to start building deeper and more lasting relationships.

    3. Consistency is key

    How much engagement your posts garner will often depend on when and how often you post. Not only does each channel (like Facebook or LinkedIn) tend to have different times when engagement is at its peak, but your specific audience may also have their own preferences. A little research here can go a long way.

    Build a sustainable cadence and stay the course. Consistency is crucial. If you post more than once a day, make sure that each has a few hours to shine on its own. And if a post is getting a particularly high response rate, wait a while before potentially drowning it out with something new. Remember: Algorithms are looking for engagement, not frequency.

    4. Mix it up

    Another way to ensure better engagement (and a better response from the algorithm!) is to mix up the type of content you share. Your online presence should be a healthy medley of brand, industry, and personal and community content.

    You will need to figure out what the right balance for your own audience is. Think about what they care about, the questions they ask when you work together, or specific local concerns. The bottom line in every case is to make sure you’re maintaining a variety of relevant content in your social selling strategy.

    5. Give and take

    Approach social media as a conversation, not a bullhorn. Social selling is about more than just getting engagement — it’s also about engaging with your audience in return. This give and take is how relationships are made and strengthened, whether they be prospects or clients you know and love.

    Don’t just be reactive by responding only to comments or likes on your posts. Take time to respond to others’ posts as well, whether they’re customers or other thought leaders in the industry. This doesn’t always have to be through comments, either; a simple like can let people know you’re paying attention to what they have to say.

    Social selling is a powerful tool that can help financial advisors bring in new prospects and keep old clients coming back for more advice through the power of relationship and trust building. However, in order to rise above the noise, you can’t lean on your — or your firm’s — reputation. Instead, you need to establish an authentic presence for yourself that showcases exactly what makes you the right person for the job.

    Learn more by downloading our Social Selling Guidebook for Financial Institutions.

    When my father worked in insurance decades ago, he’d sit down with people at their kitchen tables and listen. He’d share. He’d build the relationship. And he’d sell.

    Fast forward to the digital age, and authenticity still has just as much relevance, if not more. The only difference? Social media platforms replaced the kitchen table. Instead of coming to people’s front doors, agents are coming in through Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. These exchanges are no less real to potential clients — and no less critical to the relationship-building model that succeeds time and again in the insurance industry.

    Most intermediaries and their carriers know the importance of social media by now, while others might need more guidance around strategy and how to implement it at the agent level. Even new agents from digitally native generations can find the “hows” of fully leveraging social media confusing and intimidating.

    Whether an agent is new to social or has been running personal accounts for years, it’s essential to use social media as more than a digital billboard. Instead, agents must use social media as a vehicle to take their relationship-building and thought leadership into the digital world. And most importantly, they must be authentic when doing it.

    The advantages of being authentic in social

    You establish an invaluable foundation of trust when you are human on social media. It’s no secret that trust remains essential in insurance; people who don’t trust a brand, an agent, or a product will go elsewhere. Competition is fierce, and today’s consumers don’t care about brand loyalty; they care about whether or not you can meet their needs. Trust is the glue that keeps a client or prospect from saying goodbye.

    Many opportunities open up when agents use social media to get closer to your clients. For instance, a lead might mention a significant life moment on their social channel, like the birth of a child. If savvy agents follow and listen to the lead, they can drive meaningful connections with a friendly response, continually building the relationship. It’s not about closing a sale on a social post; it’s creating conditions that may eventually lead to an opportunity to present new insurance options that make sense for their new bundle of joy.

    When interactions like this are genuine and timely, they can lead to more business and even stronger ties between agents and clients.

    A final benefit of deepening relationships on social media is that you humanize your brand. Every agent should focus on showcasing their authentic personality, whether underneath a carrier banner or not. Agents whose followers see them as “the local expert” or “a trusted friend” set themselves up to become go-to resources that prospects will consult when they have insurance-related concerns. Authenticity builds relationships, which will help you connect with more of your customer base.

    Get started with social selling

    Social selling is essentially what it sounds like: Using social media to build credibility, thought leadership and trust, which help to sell a product or service. This savvy marketing strategy enables intermediaries — such as agents and brokers — to bring more value to the customer journey.

    Individual content posted to social media is said to have 10 times the reach and drive double the engagement compared to content shared by brands. Consumers want to work with trusted individuals when making big decisions related to finances and insurance. As an agent, you need to be empowered to use social media in your sales mix; otherwise, you’re leaving opportunities on the table.

    So, how do you seize these opportunities? Start here…

    No. 1: See yourself as an influencer.

    In 2023, everyone’s heard of social-media influencers. These ambassadors use their personal talents and creativity to build loyal followings and offer sway and endorsement to brands. To get in the right mindset, you should try to see yourself as a micro-influencer for your community. This perspective can help you grow your following and prioritize your engagement strategy (think commenting, replying and liking posts).

    Consumers are turning their backs on traditional advertising. They’re not turning their backs on influencers, however, especially when they’re local. In fact, micro-influencers have been found to have even higher follower engagement than their macro counterparts. Fewer followers mean more time to interact with each one, leading to stronger relationships. Some even see them as the voice of reason and truth. Agents who adopt practices that get creative, showcase their personalities, offer value and aim to solve followers’ problems will quickly find a loyal, influencer-like audience.

    No. 2: Get personal.

    Plenty of agents live and work in the neighborhoods they serve. This allows you to craft locally specific posts that are relevant to prospects and clients but not overtly promotional or self-serving. It’s OK to talk about statistics, sales or promotions occasionally, but you will find more success in the community by sharing content relevant to where you work and live.

    This could mean anything from giving a quick shout-out to a favorite small-business coffee shop to discussing how a product helped a client. (Always following all regulations, of course.) Putting a regional flavor and human face on social media content reinforces that you’re an actual person, not just an automated bot posting pseudo-advertisements at pre-arranged intervals.

    No. 3: Aim to educate.

    As an insurance agent, you are selling a promise to consumers. A promise that many people can find confusing. Many consumers are also unaware of the life milestones that should trigger a new insurance decision.

    Using social media to demystify insurance and educate on these milestones not only highlights your expertise but puts this valuable information in the path of the consumer, who is likely starting their buying journey with self-guided research online.

    Social media can have the same intimate, relationship-boosting effect on agents and consumers as the kitchen table once did. Luckily, the secret to making social selling work isn’t all that different: Focus on authentic, genuine relationships, and you’ll find your following.

    Want to understand how it works in real time? See how Shelter Insurance® found success with social selling in this case study.

    This article was originally published in PropertyCasualty360.

    Digital transformation means that social media has become an integral part of everyday life.  It has changed the way we communicate and connect with others, and it has also transformed the way financial professionals operate. Loan officers, insurance agents, and financial advisors will find that social media networks like LinkedIn have immense potential in terms of building connections, establishing thought leadership in the industry, and supporting their business. 

    LinkedIn has quickly become a need for financial professionals: in fact, 9 out of 10 financial advisors are currently using LinkedIn for their business, and other industries can show similar numbers, too. To leverage the full potential of LinkedIn, intermediaries should create a strong social media content and post strategy. Here’s how to get started:

    Define Your Target Audience

    Before creating any content or posting anything on LinkedIn, it is essential to define the right target audience. By knowing this audience, it’s easier and more effective to craft content that resonates with them, and to also tailor any message to their needs and preferences. For the financial services industry, understanding clients and prospective clients is crucial to growing connections on social media.

    Develop a Content Strategy

    Once the target audience is identified, the next step is to develop a content strategy that aligns with business objectives. The content strategy should focus on creating value for the audience and positioning oneself as an expert in the financial industry, be it insurance, mortgage, banking, or wealth. It’s always helpful to create a mix of content, including articles, blog posts, infographics, videos, and podcasts, depending on current events and what the target audience would prefer.

    Some themes to consider using in the content strategy are:

    • Industry news and trends
    • Tips and advice for financial planning and investments
    • Case studies and success stories
    • How-to guides and tutorials
    • Thought leadership pieces on industry-specific topics

    Optimize The LinkedIn Profile

    A LinkedIn profile is the first thing that potential connections will see. Therefore, it is essential to optimize the profile to make a good impression and establish credibility. Some tips for making a LinkedIn profile stand out are:

    • Use a professional headshot
    • Write a compelling headline that reflects expertise
    • Craft a well-written summary that highlights skills and experience
    • Add relevant keywords to the profile to make it easier for people to find in search results
    • Include media such as videos, infographics, and presentations to showcase work

    Engage With Connections

    LinkedIn is a social media platform, and like any other social network, engagement is key. Engaging with connections demonstrates real interest in building important relationships and sharing valuable insights. Some meaningful ways to engage with connections might include:

    • React to and comment on posts
    • Share posts with existing network
    • Send personalized messages to build rapport and establish connections
    • Participate in LinkedIn groups relevant to industry

    Measure and Refine Your Strategy

    Finally, it is crucial to measure any LinkedIn strategy's effectiveness and refine it over time. Using social media analytics is a smart way to track an audience's engagement with posted content, such as views, likes, shares, and comments. Based on this data, it’s simple to refine an existing strategy, identify what works and what doesn't, and adjust the tactics accordingly.

    In conclusion, creating a social media content and post strategy for LinkedIn can help financial professionals build connections, establish thought leadership, and support their business. By defining the right target audience, developing a content strategy, optimizing the profile, engaging with connections, and measuring and refining the approach, anyone can leverage the full potential of LinkedIn and make social media a priority.

    Ready to start building your social selling game plan? Check out this Social Selling Playbook for Financial Institutions.

    Connect & Convert on Social

    Successfully scale conversion optimized campaigns across all social media channels with built-in compliance, publishing tools, and more.
    Book a Demo

    RESOURCES

    VISION
    March 15, 2022

    What’s the Cost of Getting Social Media Compliance Wrong?

    By
    Denim Social

    Increasingly, customers are turning to digital providers for their financial needs — traditional lenders have dropped to only 21% of mortgage sales today. But even the highest-quality AI software can’t offer the basic building blocks of trust: guidance, reassurance, customization, and empathy.

    That’s why capitalizing on the human experience and fostering genuine human interaction through social selling is key for traditional FIs to stay ahead. The trick, however, is doing it compliantly.

    Compliance missteps can cause serious damage. In early 2021, for example, MassMutual received a hefty $4.75 million penalty for not ensuring its agents followed social media compliance regulations. This might be an extreme example, but any financial institution can still land in hot water if it fails to maintain FINRA-compliant digital communications. It’s vital to put compliance at the forefront of any financial institution’s social selling strategy.

    Social Media Compliance for Financial Institutions From Denim Social

    Denim Social is a social media compliance-first experience, as compliance is the thread that runs through our programming rather than an add-on or patch. Our tools are fully integrated to give a reliable, easy-to-use experience for financial services marketers. For this reason, financial institutions can feel safe relying on our software to help them meet their social selling goals.

    How does Denim Social serve financial institutions interested in keeping up with compliance rules and regulations?

    1. We offer protection.

    The best way to ensure compliance is by finding and flagging potential content issues before any of it goes live on a site. Our workflows make sure the right eyes view and approve each post before publishing.

    Keyword filtering flags problematic words or phrases ahead of time. And when team members try to use any restricted keywords, employees will immediately be notified of the issue — whether the content is a post, comment, or even a DM. Over time, your employees will begin to recognize restricted phrases even before the system notification appears. If there’s ever a need for damage control, Denim Social’s newest tools let administrators edit or delete users’ online messages. It can also prevent posts to out-of-compliance social networks altogether.

    2. We provide constant training on social compliance.

    Many of our users say the Denim Social platform offers ongoing compliance education. Your team members learn by osmosis as they test filters and receive feedback from Compliance, which continually educates your team and builds an ongoing culture of compliance among them. As they see what posts are approved versus unapproved, they receive real-time social media compliance education.

    3. We curate content streams.

    Using our enablement tool, teams can create libraries of preapproved content to keep employees’ social feeds full without additional approvals or workflow submissions. And if curating a full library of content on your own sounds daunting, you’re in luck. Our partnership with UpContent provides content sourcing with curated third-party content from hundreds of thousands of trusted publishers. You can optimize your time with “hands-free” curation around the clock.

    This process streamlining will help your financial institution and employees build up a reputation for continuous social media use and allow you to turn your focus to vetting more personalized content. Trust that the curated content streams keep the lights on while you reach the 71% of consumers who expect personalized experiences.

    4. We keep your records neat and organized.

    Audits can happen at any time. Hopefully, you’ve moved past binders, but even if you’re keeping a spreadsheet of social posts, it’s not adequate or efficient for creating scalable, compliant social strategies. With our record-keeping tool, we automatically archive every post, comment, and like in our system, allowing you to easily find and share reports as needed for auditing. As you scale, it won’t be possible for a human on your team to capture everything. This is an essential protection for future audits and allows you to put your energies toward tasks other than record-keeping.

    The importance of social media marketing for financial institutions is growing exponentially. So is the need for social media marketing tools that can keep up with compliance needs and ever-changing FINRA rules and expectations. If your financial institution is ready to dive into social selling but you’re concerned about remaining compliant, talk to Denim Social.

    Subscribe to our newsletter and get the latest sent to your inbox.
    Thank you for subscribing!
    Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
    SIMILAR POSTS:

    In a time where it's important than ever to maintain and build existing customer relationships, financial professionals like loan officers, insurance agents, and financial advisors should look to LinkedIn as a primary means of communication and an essential part of everyday communication.

    Today, meeting customers where they are means being active on social media. Aptly named "the professional network", LinkedIn is prime territory for boosting thought leadership, crafting an online presence, and creating authentic, lasting relationships that will stand the test of time (and economic ups and downs).

    Whether you're just getting started on social media for financial professionals, or you're a seasoned LinkedIn veteran looking to make the most of the network, it's time for financial institutions to take LinkedIn seriously in 2024.

    LinkedIn Can Help Build Trust & Credibility

    It seems simple to say, but trust hinges on authentic relationships. Today’s customers want to work with real people who connect with them on a human level. That’s why it’s so important to be yourself when using social networks like LinkedIn. Put some of your personality into their social  posts, talk about things that are important to you, or ask your networks questions. (If this keeps you up at night from a risk perspective, know that approval tools like Denim Social can help ensure compliance.)

    When people interact with you through LinkedIn, they’ll see how much reliable value you provide to their lives and will be more likely to trust your brand with their livelihoods. Authenticity is even more crucial when it comes to attracting prospects at the top of the funnel who haven’t gotten the chance to meet (and befriend) you yet.

    While the current economic climate poses many potential challenges, remember that gaining and keeping customers’ trust is the key to acquiring and retaining clients (even in tough times). Lean on social media networks like LinkedIn to tell the your brand’s story, build thought leadership online, and gain more followers who convert into new clients. Let them get to know your institution and you, and they’ll want to work (and stay) with you for years to come.

    LinkedIn Is A Winning Choice

    It's hard to hear, but if you aren't on LinkedIn already, you're already behind. In fact, 9 out of 10 financial advisors are using LinkedIn for their business, and other industries see similar usage numbers. The same way that email and text messaging have become routine modes of communication, so will social media like LinkedIn.

    You can bet that your audience will be there, too. Over 16% of LinkedIn users log on every single day, and this number continues to grow as the networks becomes more and more popular among the groups that financial professionals target most frequently, like young professionals and business leaders.

    Being active and sustaining a regular presence can have some serious payoffs. For example, pages that post weekly instead of just monthly have almost 6 times as many followers.

    The future is bright for those that use LinkedIn to their advantage. It's clear that there's no slowing down its momentum as a primary social network!

    LinkedIn Can Help You Educate

    Are there certain points you are always trying to get across with your customers, or questions you are routinely asked? Look no further than LinkedIn. Use this powerful network to create and share posts that will position you as one of the top expert in your field and in your community.

    There are currently over 27 million people that look to LinkedIn as an educational tool. When someone comes looking for an answer to their question, you want to be the go-to source of truth for them.

    With LinkedIn, you can share graphics, videos, documents, photos, and more. It's easy to diversify your content to make your profile a wealth of knowledge for your customers and prospects. If you are looking for more ideas on how to make the most of LinkedIn, check out Denim's Social's Best Practices For LinkedIn.

    In sum, LinkedIn is basically your new business card. Use it well! Don't let your opportunities on LinkedIn pass you by. Start prepping now to get your strategy in order so you find success on LinkedIn in 2024. Interested in other social networks, too? Try downloading our Social Selling Playbook for Financial Institutions. Happy posting!

    Being responsible for your team’s social selling strategy can be daunting, especially if you don’t have a plan or support. We see it firsthand at Denim Social – without a meaningful strategy, users may not be eager (or downright resistant) to jump on a new platform. So, how are others getting their teams onboard? We learn a lot from our Denim Social customers to learn how they’re making it happen. Overall, we have observed four keys to adoption success.

    Activate a hybrid distribution approach.

    We find that teams that utilize a hybrid approach to posting have the most empowered associates. What does it look like in practice? This usually includes the marketing team posting brand content on behalf of associates, and associates scheduling out pre-approved industry content from a content library, plus sprinkling in their own personal content. And rest assured, that personal content still goes through approval workflows.  

    Build a robust content library.

    If you’re going to ask associates to post content, you’ve got to make it easy and compliant. Our platform offers content libraries filled with pre-approved posts. We see that when associates have lots of content to choose from, they post more frequently.

    It's a win-win for all: Compliance teams can be confident that they are managing any content that's being posted, marketing teams can provide support more readily and get more messaging across, and users can quickly build up a content calendar with engaging, customizable posts.

    Communicate the value of social media consistently.

    Your teams need to be able to answer the age old question, “what’s in it for me?” Your teams are busy and that means you need to help them see why spending their valuable time on social media is worth it.

    In a time when meeting customers where they are means being on social media, it's essential that intermediaries look to their networks to take advantage of existing connections and forming new ones. Social media is a highly visible and time-efficient way to strengthen important relationships. It's all about doing more with less!

    Train and Train Again

    Baking social media and Denim Social training into the onboarding process is a great way to introduce new and motivated associates to a fresh way to drive their business.  It is also important to keep social media top of mind for ALL associates. An ongoing training program outlining compliance/social policy, the value of social media and Denim Social is a must, whether it be monthly or quarterly. Marketing is not often top of mind for salespeople, so it is important to continuously educate them on how to get involved and optimize their strategies.  

    Many of our Denim Social customers set up trainings that include: monthly new hire social media and compliance training courses, Denim Social overviews, a monthly Denim Social refresher training, a Quarterly Strategy training, and ongoing 1:1 assistance for users. It's all about keeping social media top of mind and having easy access to resources.

    For many, these training programs are a well oiled machine, and keeps their social program growing by educating and informing users consistently.

    If you’re struggling with adoption, these strategies can help. And of course, persistence pays off.

    Social media is only as valuable as its users and that makes adoption key. If you’re struggling to motivate your team to hop on the social media bandwagon the right tools and support can make all the difference. If you want to learn more about how the Denim Social platform works, schedule a demo with us today.


    Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media. 

    When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect. 

    “Everyone wants a quick response, they want to be communicated with in the way they want it…speed and availability demands have created challenges that they have to be able to be everything to the customer in the way that they want it.” - Bryan Clarke, SVP

    With Denim Social, Dart Bank launched a formal social selling program for over 50 loan officers in just a few months. Dart Bank started by posting on behalf of their loan officers. Through regular training and education combined with access to compliant content libraries, loan officers have gained the confidence to start posting to their own pages. It was important for Dart Bank to build a strong foundation and enable their team to make social media more personalized. 

    See how they helped strengthen customer relationships in this Case Study.

    Where Are the Biggest Opportunities to Use Social Media in Financial Services?

    Denim Social's Guide To Social Selling For Financial Services shows that most financial professionals — 83% of those surveyed — have a social media presence. It’s a great place to start, but having a profile is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what benefits financial institutions can enjoy from social media. Smart financial marketers and their teams should be optimizing their social selling efforts on every network to get the most out of what social media has to offer.

    Customers are active in many other places online, so why not meet them there? After all, 79% of people look to social media for financial advice. By meeting customers where they are on the main 4 networks, financial institutions can stay top of mind and grow real, authentic connections. Let’s dive into what Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook have to offer and how financial services marketers can best use each platform.

    1. Instagram

    As far as major social media platforms in financial services go, Instagram tops the list. While many financial professionals might not at first think of the photographic and visual network as prime business territory, its popularity makes it an excellent place to strengthen real relationships. 

    Instagram is one of the best ways to get in front of younger audiences, which is a worthwhile goal, considering that many Millennial customers will likely be on the search for new financial services providers as Baby Boomers pass their wealth on to the next generations. What's more, 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business account and 80% use the platform to discover new products.


    Even better, getting started on Instagram is a breeze. Instagram ads also allow hyperlinks, so you can lead readers right from their feeds to your website with specific calls to action to learn more. Lead them to a personalized and well-designed landing page on your site, for instance, and you'll be drawing each follower who clicks through one big step closer to conversion.

    2. LinkedIn

    The majority of financial services providers already use LinkedIn, and there are many ways to make it perhaps the most successful social selling platform out of all the networks. Employees at institutions of all sizes and financial industries can use this professional network to cultivate thought leadership and educate their customers.

    For financial services marketers, a brand profile is a necessary starting point. Getting the most out of the platform, however, requires activating your employees in a social selling strategy. They can share relevant content, such as videos and published articles from trusted media outlets, as well as engage with customers and prospects one-on-one via direct messaging to establish themselves as experts and build trusting relationships. People want to engage with other people, not with general brand pages. It’s no wonder that employees on social media can garner 10x the engagement of brand pages alone.

    3. Twitter

    Like LinkedIn, Twitter is also a great place for agents, loan officers, and advisors to share their expertise. Understandably, financial services marketers might be intimidated by the fast-paced nature of the platform and fear they don’t have enough resources to keep up. However, with the proper social media management tools, maintaining compliant engagement on Twitter is totally possible — and worth it.

    One of the greatest benefits of social media marketing for financial services is the ability to provide more value to customers. Twitter makes this incredibly easy to do. Marketers can follow all relevant news media outlets and keep an eye out for any articles that might benefit their clients or prospects. For example, an explainer piece on recent changes in tax legislation may be helpful come tax season. Retweeting such helpful resources educates followers on financial topics and builds trust in the brand and its employees.

    There’s no single best social media platform for marketing. Each one has a unique opportunity to reach and engage current and future customers. If you’re already on social media, it’s time to level up your social media marketing strategy by diving into Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in more depth. No matter the size of your financial institution, extending your social media strategy to encompass these platforms can help grow your audience, build trust, and maintain solid customer relationships.

    ST. LOUIS, August 30, 2023 – Capacity, an AI-powered support automation platform, today announced the acquisitions of Denim Social and LumenVox. Capacity’s support automation platform empowers teams to do their best work and deliver valuable customer experiences across channels. With the addition of Denim Social and LumenVox’s products, the platform is charting a course to provide solutions that define the future of work and omnichannel customer engagement for its 1,900+ customers across numerous industries.

    Capacity’s acquisitions of Denim Social and LumenVox are fueling its transformation from a self-service, single channel tool to an omnichannel support and engagement automation platform. Whether providing customer and employee support, assisting agents or reaching out to customers, the Capacity platform now offers a complete solution across web, voice, SMS, email and social media. 

    “Customers need support everywhere. Our expanded platform will free up team members to do their best work while also building more meaningful relationships with their customers,” said David Karandish, CEO, Capacity. “Denim Social’s platform will empower brands to more effectively communicate with customers on their social channel of choice and LumenVox’s tools are key in our expansion into voice automation.”

    Denim Social, based in St. Louis, is a software provider that elevates the way professionals in the banking, insurance, mortgage and wealth management industries connect and sell on social media. With Denim Social integrated into the platform, Capacity users will be able to launch proactive social media campaigns to reach customers and deepen relationships. 

    “Social media is a must-have tool for today’s modern seller. Combining Capacity’s AI-powered automations with Denim Social’s campaign tools will enable users across industries to more effectively stay engaged on social media and focus their time on delivering authentic interactions,” said Doug Wilber, CEO, Denim Social. Wilber has assumed the role of Chief Strategy Officer at Capacity, following the acquisition. 

    LumenVox is a leading global speech and voice technology provider based out of San Diego. LumenVox works with customers to build secure self-service and customer-agent interactions. Its tools will enable Capacity users to transform customer engagement with AI-driven speech recognition and voice authentication technology.

    “The right voice technology can save teams countless support hours. Marrying LumenVox’s technology with the Capacity platform ensures voice is a seamless part of the omnichannel experience,” said Nigel Quinnin, CEO, LumenVox. Quinnin will lead Capacity’s voice initiatives. 

    The acquisitions of Denim Social and LumenVox significantly expand the capabilities and scale of the Capacity platform. Today, Capacity estimates that every month its platform will: 

    • Analyze 3,000,000,000 calls
    • Send 10,000,000 SMS messages
    • Deliver 500,000 social posts
    • Execute 386,000 workflows and automations
    • Deflect 140,000 tickets and emails

    “With these two great additions to the Capacity platform, we’re proudly offering customers an all-in-one solution for support and customer experience,” said Karandish. 

    Capacity’s acquisitions of Denim Social and LumenVox closely follows a deal with Textel, an enterprise SMS provider, earlier this year. Capacity will maintain its headquarters in St. Louis. With the acquisitions, its headcount is now more than 100 employees. The terms of the transactions are confidential.

    For more information on how Capacity helps teams do their best work, please visit capacity.com/omnichannel.

    About Capacity

    Founded in 2017, Capacity is a support automation platform that uses AI to promote self-service, providing immediate Tier 0 and Tier 1 support for customers and internal teams. Capacity answers over 90% of FAQs and escalates more pressing, nuanced issues to the right person. Capacity works across web, voice, SMS, email and social media to help teams do their best work. For more information, visit Capacity.com.

    About Denim Social

    Denim Social is a Software As A Service (SaaS) provider that powers social selling programs. The Denim Social platform helps brands empower their producers to compliantly communicate, share, and sell on their social channels of choice. Denim Social partners with forward-thinking marketing teams in regulated industries including banking, mortgage, insurance and wealth management. The social selling platform is used by corporate level admins and local producers to amplify brand messaging and power sales on social media. For more information, visit DenimSocial.com.

    About LumenVox

    LumenVox is an industry-leading provider of speech-enabling software, bringing the power of voice to customers worldwide and facilitating billions of customer interactions. The LumenVox software portfolio consists of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with transcription, Call Progress Analysis (CPA), Voice Biometrics, and Text-to-Speech (TTS). Designed to be highly flexible, accurate, and scalable, LumenVox helps some of the world’s largest cloud-first companies reimagine customer engagement by delivering exceptional voice experiences. LumenVox also provides self-service tools that enable customers to easily tune, adjust, and create language models. For more information, visit LumenVox.com.

    *This article was originally published in PRNewswire.

    Whether you love or loathe social media's infiltration into every element of our personal and professional lives, there's no denying that this powerful medium is never going away. Social networks are growing bigger and stronger by the day. Forward-thinking achievers in every industry understand this and have responded by leaning all the way into social selling.

    For the unaware, social selling is using social media to sell a product or service by showcasing authenticity, strengthening relationships with clients and prospects, and building thought leadership. In social selling, advisors use their own social pages to promote content about their brand and services, but with a personal spin.

    Everyone from dog groomers to financial advisors are utilizing multiple social networks to build a following and bolster their personal brands, and those who fully embrace social media's ubiquity outperform their competitors and win more business. It's as simple as that.

    The key, though, is finding a way to stand out from the competition online. There's a big difference between "doing social media" and doing it well.

    The difficulty with differentiation

    As we all know, the internet is more than likely the first place individuals go to get advice these days — financial, familial, and absolutely everything in between. So when people go online to search for guidance on money matters, they won't find you if you aren't there, actively promoting your expertise and services.

    There's no stronger business case for social media (and social selling) than that: It's where your potential customers are. Meet them there and give them what they need. If you don't, someone else will.

    To set yourself apart as a financial advisor, you need to be able to sell yourself — not just your firm. Sure, many financial advisors are intermediated and you likely don't have free rein to post everything you might want to on social channels, but that shouldn't be a deal-breaker. There's still plenty to say without risking any backlash or drawing the ire of regulators.

    Put your fears aside

    Though some in the financial industry might feel wary or daunted by interacting directly with clients or prospects, online exchanges matter in today’s market. Brands that use a more generic social-media strategy can end up sounding too promotional, focused more on boosting the brand to a broad audience instead of forging real connections. Rather than creating original content that speaks to their particular audience, financial institutions treat these social channels as glorified billboards instead of networking opportunities for each individual advisor.

    That’s too bad because there’s real power behind social selling today. When comparing the social media potential of brands vs. individuals, one study found that employees have 10 times the reach and double the engagement of the brands they speak for. The best sellers in large companies, meanwhile, were the ones who regularly used technology to foster connections with new prospects or existing clients. Building genuine relationships pays off for both advisors and brands.

    So, how does someone improve their social-selling efforts? How can financial advisors use the power of their individuality to differentiate themselves from their peers? Here are five tips to help you better accomplish social selling on your personal pages:

    1. Ask an expert

    Even if you’re on board with tapping into the potential of authentic relationship-building through social selling, you still need the right tools and training for the job. After all, your area of expertise is in the valuable services you provide to your clients, not online marketing.

    An excellent move for advisors is to seek advice from your firms’s marketing or branding team. Not only can they help you develop an effective social-selling strategy, but they can also provide you with the resources and tools you need to more effectively and efficiently create, plan, and schedule your posts. Compliance experts can also educate you on the rules that govern social media in the financial services industry. Ideally, your firm provides continuous training and tools to ensure you stay on the right side of regulations.

    2. Be real

    The type of posts that most people see on their social-media feeds are at least partially determined by an algorithm. These algorithms are generally designed to serve up content that users are most likely to engage with in one way or another. This can be a huge advantage, but it also means that you can’t expect to stay on people’s minds if you deliver bland, uninteresting content that isn't relevant to your audience.

    That doesn’t mean you should go posting clickbait or try to shock people (there’s definitely such a thing as bad engagement). Instead, the best way to get and keep people’s attention is to be your real self. Post about what matters to you and do it in your own voice, not just copying/pasting brand posts. Post about local happenings that people in your area might care about. Speak to the challenges you hear clients ask about most. In social selling, authenticity is the fastest way to start building deeper and more lasting relationships.

    3. Consistency is key

    How much engagement your posts garner will often depend on when and how often you post. Not only does each channel (like Facebook or LinkedIn) tend to have different times when engagement is at its peak, but your specific audience may also have their own preferences. A little research here can go a long way.

    Build a sustainable cadence and stay the course. Consistency is crucial. If you post more than once a day, make sure that each has a few hours to shine on its own. And if a post is getting a particularly high response rate, wait a while before potentially drowning it out with something new. Remember: Algorithms are looking for engagement, not frequency.

    4. Mix it up

    Another way to ensure better engagement (and a better response from the algorithm!) is to mix up the type of content you share. Your online presence should be a healthy medley of brand, industry, and personal and community content.

    You will need to figure out what the right balance for your own audience is. Think about what they care about, the questions they ask when you work together, or specific local concerns. The bottom line in every case is to make sure you’re maintaining a variety of relevant content in your social selling strategy.

    5. Give and take

    Approach social media as a conversation, not a bullhorn. Social selling is about more than just getting engagement — it’s also about engaging with your audience in return. This give and take is how relationships are made and strengthened, whether they be prospects or clients you know and love.

    Don’t just be reactive by responding only to comments or likes on your posts. Take time to respond to others’ posts as well, whether they’re customers or other thought leaders in the industry. This doesn’t always have to be through comments, either; a simple like can let people know you’re paying attention to what they have to say.

    Social selling is a powerful tool that can help financial advisors bring in new prospects and keep old clients coming back for more advice through the power of relationship and trust building. However, in order to rise above the noise, you can’t lean on your — or your firm’s — reputation. Instead, you need to establish an authentic presence for yourself that showcases exactly what makes you the right person for the job.

    Learn more by downloading our Social Selling Guidebook for Financial Institutions.

    Connect & Convert on Social

    Successfully scale conversion optimized campaigns across all social media channels with built-in compliance, publishing tools, and more.
    Book a Demo

    Connect & Convert on Social

    Successfully scale conversion optimized campaigns across all social media channels with built-in compliance, publishing tools, and more.
    Book a Demo

    Connect & Convert on Social

    Successfully scale conversion optimized campaigns across all social media channels with built-in compliance, publishing tools, and more.
    Book a Demo