Going Social

I was recently looking back at a video we produced at the end of 2009 which stated the number of people signed up to Facebook was approximately 120 million, which at the time seemed pretty huge. By the end of 2011 this had risen to an eye popping 800 million users. To put this in a different way, if Facebook were a country it would now be the third biggest country in the world!

With 30 million people in the UK now using Facebook, it’s likely that many of your clients will be among them. Before you ask, Facebook is not just for kids – 55 to 64 year olds is currently the fastest growing age group joining Facebook.

Stats on YouTube are as mind boggling as Facebook, with 2 billion views a day and an average of 24 hours of video currently being uploaded every minute.

Facebook and YouTube are two great examples of the social media phenomenon that’s changing the way people communicate, interact and connect with each other – but what is meant by the term social media?

Since we’ve used the Wiki definition for social media, it’s worth noting that Wikipedia is another hugely successful example of social media, with 3.82 million English language articles now available and 365 million readers worldwide.

Networking opportunities for financial advisers

There are plenty of financial advisers already embracing Social Media as a way of interacting with their financial services’ peers, and Twitter and LinkedIn are two places where we see this happening the most. 

Twitter has over 300 million users worldwide and is one of the most popular social media outposts for UK financial advisers, with more and more people and companies beginning to attract significant Twitter followings, for example:

• @IFALife has 5,500+ followers
• @petematthew has 2,000 followers

If you’re on Twitter, why not start following @SkandiaUK or our in-house investment expert @GrahamBentley? We want to hear what’s on your mind and we can also give you immediate access to great Skandia content as well as the best news and views from our fund group partners.

LinkedIn has over 90 million members and this membership is growing at a rate of one person every second.  7.6 million of these people are from the UK and there’s a growing financial adviser community establishing itself in the form of adviser interest groups – here are two examples:

• UK IFA has 1,984 members
• New Model Advisers has 1,313 members

If you’re not engaged in social media yet, both Twitter and LinkedIn represent two good ways in which to dip your toe in the water. In addition to providing some great networking opportunities, social media also presents some new and interesting ways in which you could be interacting with your customers. I’ll be uncovering some of these opportunities throughout 2012, which I hope you’ll find useful and insightful.  

Jeremy Mugridge is Head of Digital Marketing at Skandia.