May 2020
PH I L CALVE RT
WHY COMMUNITY AMONGST
FINANCIAL ADVISERS IS NOW MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER BEFORE Social media might not bump up your leads overnight, but Phil Calvert explains why now is the time to engage with IFA platforms allowing you to share ideas, experiences and expertise on how best to support your clients.
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ack in late 2002 I began thinking about running an experiment with financial advisers to see if they would use an online group on a social networking platform to interact and engage with each other – a kind of industry watercooler.
most IFAs only generally networked with each other by accident – at industry awards, exhibitions, provider events etc. But now there was a new way for financial advisers to network with each other twenty-four hours a day should they want to.
To put this into context, you need to bear in mind that in 2002, social media as we know it today didn’t exist. Yes, people were communicating with each other on a few platforms (Ecademy, MSN Messenger, Friendster), but the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al were still but digital twinkles in entrepreneurs’ eyes.
TURNS OUT THAT A GREAT MANY DID WANT TO
Xing and LinkedIn were the first big networks out of the blocks in 2003, both of which broadly modelled what Ecademy had been doing since 1998, though Ecademy never really got the recognition it deserved as essentially the world’s first B2B social networking platform.
Our little online community for financial advisers soon reached four hundred members, and then plateaued because there just weren’t any more advisers out there who were ready to take a plunge into the world of social networking. Very few advisers even had a website – let alone profiles on social networking sites. So we created another version of the group on LinkedIn and also on its own standalone website, and slowly but surely more and more advisers started to join.
So I created a group on Ecademy (much like a group that you might find on LinkedIn or Facebook today), and I invited some of the more tech-savvy IFAs I knew to join, where they could network, share best practice, exchange ideas, moan about providers, get marketing ideas and more. Having spent the previous twenty years with the likes of NEL (broadly now UNUM) and Zurich Life, I knew that
Fast-forward to 2020 and our LifeTalk community for advisers has a presence on LinkedIn with 7,100 members, Facebook with 2,080 members and a brandnew marketing and lead generation focused group on the Mighty Networks platform. IFAs still use the groups in the same way – to network, share best practice and to provide help and support to one another, but it’s
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