There's More To A Social Media Landing Page Than Disclosure

Firms whose every public communication needs to be evaluated in terms of its compliance with regulations can sometimes inadvertently mistake who the customer is. The customer isn’t the regulator. There’s more to do, more to be communicated once the regulations have been satisfied.

A case in point: What’s being linked to from many investment firms’ social profiles.

Let's review: 

• Establishing a presence on social networks is no cakewalk for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers. It’s a cross-functional tightrope, and the operating guidelines can take months to pull together. Even after all that, Legal and Compliance may have reservations, and there can be the veiled threat that it could all be undone at any time.

To prevail and move forward, marketers pledge to be on their very best behavior. There's no appetite for revisiting what's already been approved, and working well enough. 

• And yet, there's an opportunity to consider: The establishment of an account on a social network gives that account the potential for visibility that far exceeds any other unpaid opportunity on an Internet presence with highly engaged traffic. 

Specifically, the ability to link from the home state of the social account—the bio of the Twitter profile or the About pages on Facebook or YouTube (where more space is available)—provides a near priceless chance to move people interested in what you say on a social platform to your own domain. 

The opportunity here is different from online advertising in at least three ways: It has no expiration date, your potential reach is limitless and yet no minimum number of impressions is assured, and there's no charge. 

As with advertising, the page you link to needs to be well considered. The best practice for online ads is to direct traffic to a landing page customized to anticipate just that traffic.

However, many firms don't offer a link to a social-audience landing page to visitors to their social profile pages. There are plenty of instances where social profiles link to landing pages that are no more than the firm’s home page—you know, those kitchen sinks dressed up as extravaganzas in sight, animation and hyperlinks. Where's a newcomer supposed to go?

Worse, some bios link to a fund company’s prospectus page or Legal disclosure or documents. And that sound you hear is the sound of someone back-back-backing up and out. Too serious too soon.

While links to those pages may satisfy Compliance, they fall short of what your bio-clickers might be looking for. They need additional attention if you have any expectations to convert that traffic.

A Few Deviations On The Landing Page Theme

What are your options, while still meeting all of Compliance's requirements? A spot-check of the pages that FINRA-regulated firms link to from their Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages show more variety than you might expect. While none of these pages is visually arresting in the way that advertising landing pages strive to be, you’ll see an effort to 1)communicate more than what’s required 2)be visitor-centric and even 3)seek to convert. 

Excerpts are shown below, which means that you may not see the required disclosures in the screenshot. Follow the links or click on the images to see the full pages.

BlackRock and Franklin Templeton (shown below) use their pages to pass on some participation guidelines.

As one of the few firms that allows commenting, U.S. Global Investors explains its YouTube guidelines. This is the rare investment firm landing page that's unique to just one social network.

It’s conceivable that that some client/prospect visitors will discover the existence of social accounts not from participating on the networks themselves but while on your site. The UBS (by including a Twitter feed in addition to lots of other options in the left- and right-hand columns) and Vanguard (by including the tweeters’ bios) pages make room for that possibility. These pages could convert Website visitors to Twitter account followers.

Yay—MainStay’s “legal notice page” includes an attempt to convert visitors to email subscribers. A sample of what to expect might also help drive signups.

This T. Rowe Price page can be arrived at from the firm’s Twitter or YouTube channel account. "Conversion" from this page would involve a gain in followers for other social accounts.

Finally, Natixis and Well Fargo Asset Management (shown below) include their own blogs in their landing pages’ social account listings. 

   

When thinking about re-opening your own kettle of worms, review your Web analytics to see how your current “landing page” performs. That should tell you all you need to know about traffic sourced from social sites.

For additional perspectives on social media landing pages, also check out these posts from other sources: 

• Why You Need Social Media Landing Pages (Not Just a Homepage!) (2014)
• The Social Media Landing Page – The Underutilized Page You’ll Kick Yourself For Not Having (2013)
• The Anatomy Of A Great Social Media Landing Page (2010) 

How About Streaming Your Podcasts?

Here’s a friendly reminder that content syndication requires continual monitoring. Opportunities that once seemed bright can dim overtime while new directions are constantly emerging.

A case in point: If you’re an investment firm that offers podcasts to be downloaded, consider making them available to also be streamed. Streaming video (e.g., Netflix) and streaming music (e.g., Pandora) get most of the attention, but faster Internet connections and wider bandwidths have also changed the access habits of podcast listeners.

The ability to forego the downloading and syncing process with a media player in favor of streaming a podcast on-demand significantly improves the podcast listening experience. I can tell you from my own experience that not having to plan ahead has resulted in my listening to even more podcasts, from more devices (desktop, iPad and smartphone) and more faithfully. I am crazy for podcasts. (And if it's data you want, see this TopRank blog post from earlier in the week.)

Stitcher!

As long as you’re going to the trouble to create podcast content, making the podcast available on a streaming service could make an incremental contribution to your listenership.

Stitcher is believed to be “the largest platform for listening on Android and second largest on iOS behind only Apple [iTunes]," according to Libysn, the leading podcast hosting platform quoted in a Stitcher press release in October 2013.

In fact, a look at the top show in Stitcher’s Business and Industry category suggests that Stitcher has listeners who may be interested in what you have to say. Note that NPR’s Planet Money podcast is on 101,000 playlists. Something to strive for.

Many of the leading investment-type podcasts on iTunes can be found on Stitcher, but few investment company podcasts are.

An exception I found is Wells Fargo Advantage Funds' "On The Trading Desk" podcast whose screenshot from an Android phone is below.

Like on iTunes, if your podcast isn’t in Stitcher’s top 100, most of the optimization and promotion is up to you. However, see the Discover tab in the screenshot—here’s where a listener to the Wells Fargo podcast might be introduced to yours. As is, the referrals today are to The Dave Ramsey Show, the Suze Orman Show and other media properties.

Next

If I were you, I would: 

• Make sure all internally are OK with the idea. Previously, some podcasters have balked at the thought that advertising would be displayed adjacent to their podcasts (see the ad at the bottom of the Wells Fargo image). There's no question that Stitcher has more of a commercial feel than downloading a file via iTunes. But, is this any different from posting content to Facebook or LinkedIn, which also place ads near your content? 
• Review the application process to be accepted as a Stitcher content provider, it’s not much of a hurdle. 
• Blow the dust off all that “download and add to your MP3 player” language on your Website and update it with the explanation that your content can be streamed and added to playlists, too. That will mean that you or someone on your team will have to experience Stitcher in order to write the copy. My bet is you’ll love it.
• Throw a little promotional support behind your podcast when you get the word that your content has been added to Stitcher. 

In the investment management space, podcasting has a tired vibe. But elsewhere Internet radio has taken off, and with the demographics that investment firms seek. Below is a screenshot from "The New Mainstream 2013," a study of Internet radio usage and adoption conducted by Edison Research, in partnership with Pandora, Spotify and TuneIn. And, even more on-point, Stitcher says the average podcast listener stays connected for an average of 22 minutes. Wouldn't you want in on that?

The Challenge Of Making Remarkable Content

Five, maybe six, years ago, many asset management marketing communications teams were fairly satisfied with their approach to their work.

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms had corralled the words and numbers that populated their run-rate communications, mapped the review and approval processes, and implemented systems designed to assure consistency, timely automated output and even cost-efficiencies. Comparisons to donut-making were not far off.

All of the hard work invested to get to that place was by no means wasted, and enables a significant communication effort today. In the years between 2008-ish and now, a content factory-like approach has also been put in place to support the heightened demand for firms' thought leadership content pieces.  

But, our work is never done. In 2013, the marketplace’s expectations of content have advanced. Increasingly, the requirement is to create content that’s “remarkable.”

What’s required to create remarkable content is too new to be scripted, let alone engineered. Unlike the routine production of largely text-heavy communications for physical and virtual literature shelves, it's exception-based. The pursuit of remarkable content typically extends time to market (except when market conditions require accelerating it!), taps random groups and individuals not typically part of the communications creation chain, invariably increases costs and yields inconsistent results. 

If most other communications are donuts, think of remarkable content as souffles. But oh, the rush (and rewards) when a piece of content satisfies!

The Formula

There is no prescribing a formula for what makes content remarkable today. It’s likely to be visual, more likely to be non-text than text, may tell a story and may strive to move the content consumer, whether in laughter, empathy or sympathy. It’s often ambitious and in that ambition runs a very real risk of falling flat.

Sorry, this doesn’t help much, does it? If you’re like most people, you know remarkable content when you see it—whether you find it yourself or receive an endorsement of it from someone you know. In that spirit, here are three examples of non-industry content that I (along with many, many others) have LOVED or otherwise found remarkable lately, along with some comments for you. 

Help Us Experience Something

Horse races can be thrilling, but watching them on television or even in person is not a wholly satisfying experience.

Two days after this year’s Kentucky Derby, the digital sports information company Trackus published this video of the winning horse’s path from an over-the-shoulder perspective behind the jockey. It’s exhilarating to view, especially for those who watched the race and saw the jockey making his move right around the 1:17 mark. More important, it adds to the spectator's understanding of how thoroughbred races are run.

Simulating the experience of an investor is tough stuff, which is partly why this industry for so long defaulted to photos of silver-haired seniors on sailboats. In form and substance they're anachronisms and fall short of the kinds of communicating that's called for today.

Starting with Web-based portfolio tools and calculators, the industry has been trying to help investors visualize. Last year Merrill Lynch produced its Face Retirement Tool, which enables people to age a photo of themselves. And, Vanguard’s My Life Ticker campaign, released this March, aims to help investors focus on why they invest and the key factors in their investment success.

There is still lots of room for your firm to offer its own take.

Share Data That Only You Have

I challenge you to bounce off the YouTube Trends Map—you can’t, you won’t! Google’s sharing of the most popular YouTube videos right now, as filtered by location, gender, age group will keep you riveted well longer than five seconds. And then you might bookmark the URL or email/social share to others. It is remark-able.

We see limited data sharing in this space. Every quarter Fidelity produces an analysis of its 401(k) accounts as sort of a time and temperature report on workers’ readiness for retirement. PowerShares shares its ETF inflow data as well as its most viewed Website pages for the week.

$SPLV was the PowerShares #ETF with highest net inflows in April.View more in the Connection: pwr.sh/con

— PowerShares (@PowerShares) May 22, 2013

Most viewed funds on powershares.com this week: $QQQ $PKW $BKLN $SPLV $DBC

— PowerShares (@PowerShares) May 24, 2013

Data can tell a lot of stories in this business. There’s much more firms can do to creatively present the data they can share.  

It Wouldn’t Kill Us All To Enjoy A Good Laugh

Stipulated: Asset management marketing, financial communications in general, is serious business. But surely there are moments for levity.

Check out the yuks on this unsigned Tumblr blog of animated gifs, “Thoughts Of An IRO: If investor relations professionals could act freely.” (Below is just a screenshot, click on it for the full effect.) There would have been no better format to capture the spirit of this. 

I’d be surprised if there’s much LOLing at the asset management content being published today, but smiles and chuckles? It's still slim pickings when trying to find content that’s created to amuse. A few examples include the efforts made in Wells Fargo Advantage Funds' Daily Advantage e-newsletter, SEI’s sharing of photos in its annual ugly sweater contest or the occasional asset manager (namely, @AdvisorShares and First Trust’s @Wesbury) tweets. 

Humor is essential to relationship-building. It’s not just other industries that are incorporating humor into their online communications, it’s financial advisors and firms that serve financial advisors, too. Check out this video from Bob Veres, editor/publisher of Inside Information.

For how much longer can we avoid humor, even while striving to produce more natural investment communications? The introduction of levity is a next frontier for asset managers seeking to optimize and humanize the reach of what they have to say. 

As a matter of fact, just in case this post didn't evoke any emotion on your part, I will close now with an amateur video that I am certain will endear itself to you as something remarkable. In your content planning, don't be too quick to rule out turning to animal videos. Just don't dwell on the words in this one.

Bonus update: Compelling content was the focus of a May 30 Webinar I participated in, along with Morningstar’s Leslie Marshall and financial advisor marketing consultant Kristen Luke. The discussion “Social Media Content Beyond 140 Characters,” as moderated by Blane Warrene of RegEd, covered a lot of ground, as you'll hear in the replay embedded below. 

Wells Fargo Creates Some Flash Fun

OK, this post is a bit of a stretch on a blog focused on digital marketing for the investment industry.

• Wells Fargo last week used a flash mob in New York’s Times Square to celebrate a banking event—but hey, Wells has investment management and brokerage units.
• The event was physical not digital, but they did link it to a #HelloNY hashtag on Twitter.
• We might have missed it if the video hadn’t been uploaded to YouTube yesterday.

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Old Way/Social Way: Advisor Log-ins Vs. Web Authentication

As inspired by our dear departed Yahoo Internet Life’s Old Way/Net Way feature years ago, we last month teed up the idea of contrasting some Old Way/Social Way examples. This is the second in an occasional series. 

Old Way: Advisor Log-ins

Nearly every mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web site has a financial advisor area that requires registration. The old old way (still practiced on some sites today) is to present all unregistered or un-logged-in advisors with a roadblock—a page with nothing on it but a form to use to register or to log in. More progressive sites (see Wells Fargo Advantage Funds and Lord Abbett) start communicating even as they’re asking advisors to register for more.

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