Effective social media for insurance agencies starts with good branding. Maintain your brand and build customer loyalty through social media with these tips.
If you’ve been using social media as another vehicle to deliver your insurance agency’s sales pitch, you may soon find yourself talking to an empty room. Social media offers you the unique opportunity to provide your customers with useful insight that’s relevant to them – and to make the all-important connection between what they need and what you have to offer. Having said that, and before your agency can use social media to create brand loyalty, it first has to establish good branding. More than just slapping a logo on a Facebook page, good branding is about being accountable – on an ongoing basis – to maintain the integrity of your agency in each Facebook or Google+ status post, Tweet, YouTube upload or LinkedIn update you post.
So, how do you establish good branding for your insurance agency in social media? These five tips will help point you in the right direction.
Tip No. 1: Have a strategy. All too often, insurance agencies try to have a presence in every social media channel. Be judicious about the social media channels you choose to participate in. Do your research and find out which channel(s) are most used by your target demographic. Also, keep in mind that someone will need to manage every channel you’re engaged in. So, make sure your agency has the bandwidth to regularly post new content and monitor activity. Also, share only the information your customers will truly find valuable, such as, “Interpreting the Fine Print in Your Homeowners Insurance Policy.” If you find yourself posting about “National Doughnut Day,” it may be time to revisit that strategy.
Tip No. 2: Know that every social media channel – like each of your customers – is unique. Research the features and functionality that exists within each channel and utilize them to brand your agency. For example, in Twitter and YouTube, you have the ability to create a custom background in your brand colors. In Google+, you can create a banner image with a custom design promoting your products and services, as opposed to only including your agency’s logo as the profile image.
Tip No. 3: Maintain the “voice” of your agency. Although your tone can be much more conversational in social media than it would be on your website, there should still be a consistent voice throughout all of your marketing efforts. If your brand is very corporate, avoid using words like “cool” or “awesome” that you wouldn’t use in your other marketing pieces. Also, regardless of the tone of your agency, always use proper spelling and grammar in your social media posts. If you’re constantly shortening the word “you’re” to “ur,” your customers may wonder what shortcuts you’ll also take with their insurance policy.
Tip No. 4: Keep your filter on 24/7. If you wouldn’t say it to your entire customer base, don’t say it on Twitter. Take Chrysler, for example, which claimed that its account had been compromised after someone with access to it tweeted, “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to [curse word] drive” back in 2011. Or someone at the Red Cross who tweeted about “#gettngslizzerd” that same year. Don’t use your agency’s social media pages to vent. Call your mom for that.
Tip No. 5: Track your results. How’s your brand doing in social media? If you’re not tracking engagement from customers each month within each channel, there’s no way to tell. Keep a month-over-month Excel spreadsheet that shows what the most popular posts were, based on the individual measurements of success within that channel. For example, if you’re measuring results in Facebook, you could record the top five posts that were most “Liked” or commented on that month. Then, the next month, you could create new posts that play off of that popular topic. You can also utilize Facebook Insights to determine how many people are discovering and responding to your posts.
