I recently heard some fascinating stats about social networking:
- If Facebook were a country it would have the fourth largest population!
- The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube
- YouTube has more content on it than the entire broadcast output of US TV stations, since TV began
- Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users, TV took 13 years, the internet 4 years, the iPod 3 years. Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months! iPhone applications hit one billion downloaded in 9 months
- There are 200,000,000 blogs of which 54% update at least weekly, 34% post opinions on products and brands
- 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
In short social networking has a massive power in the market today and yet is still relatively untapped by the Life and Pensions market.
How can social networking help though? Well I believe it is a brilliant tool for enhancing market awareness, keeping regular proactive contact with clients, supporting customer service, performing market research, listening to customers and prospects. The list is endless.
Companies need to think out of the box. Social networking for many has brought down the barriers associated with privacy and personal information (often to a worrying extent) and this creates enormous opportunity for those with the appetite for information on their clients and prospects. A new service Blippy illustrates this perfectly; it allows consumers automatically to push out purchase details (sourced from their credit cards and retail accounts) in a style not dissimilar to Twitter. It then allows discussion on the purchases. Personally I find this quite baffling that individuals would expose themselves to this level of public scrutiny but they genuinely do – and in doing so provides a wealth of information to retailers, be they high street or financial brands. The lesson is to take nothing for granted and to think creatively.
Another scary example is the openness the more progressive brands have to feedback. Taking on user generated comment in a bold manner, companies like HSBC actively seek feedback, positive and negative and publish both on their websites. While the concept is scary, it has logic at the heart of the proposition. If clients have negative feelings it is better to know about them and address them. If your service is genuinely market leading, keeping tabs on market sentiment can enable companies to address issues as soon as they arise rather than waiting for resentment to build up, by when recover of the damage to the brand becomes really difficult.
We live in a world that when service is received it is instantly posted on different social media and communicated around the world. This can be passively achieved or positively encouraged. Those brave enough will add features to online facilities to let people post tweets or place comments on Facebook about their service. Firms will provide financial tools to look at their financial position and may share some of the information generated (e.g. Buying my Annuity as Open Market Option made me £x a month better off). The means of communicating is expanding rapidly and should be embraced.
The Life and Pensions providers are behind the times with Social Networking and many say it is not appropriate for such sensitive products. This is very dangerous. A recent survey by Datamonitor showed that consumers are already using online resources to get financial advices with over 50% of respondents claiming to do so. While I accept this is largely for simple products that is in part because they can’t yet access much information for the more complex products. We are seeing some movement and companies like Friends Provident are now tweeting but the industry is still behind the curve and lagging other traditionally conservative industries such as Banking.
IFAs are beginning to embrace Social Media – there is already an IFA Twitter league and a very active IFA Twitter community; Distributors have video on YouTube; Social Forums such as IFALife have active discussion groups. LinkedIn has several active groups that discuss issues such as RDR. If providers don’t join these forums they will miss out on some of the key conversations occurring in the market – often about their brands, products and service.
