So you just spent an hour or more creating a blog post for your advisor website, so what do you do now so that all of your hard work doesn’t go to waste? Cross promotion of course! This is a key factor to generate exposure for your firm and ultimately turn potential leads into clients.
If you take a look at the Twenty Over Ten Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, you will notice that we vary the types of content we share across each platform. We use a cross promotion strategy to help make scheduling across several platforms easier and more efficient.
Before sharing your new content across your social channels it’s always a good idea to create different types of visuals right after you finish writing. Doing so will keep your content fresh and interesting, and make scheduling content across various social platforms easier.
Basics of Successful Cross Promotion
As an advisor, you work with all different types of clientele who are looking for guidance in different areas of their life. Because of this, you cannot simply use the same message across the board and expect to see results. To effectively cross promote your work, you need to tailor your message to each individual platform.
For example, when promoting your blog content on LinkedIn, you’ll want to come across as more professional, while Facebook should be professional as well but you can have a little more fun with how your message comes across. On Twitter, you have a limited amount of characters, so it’s a balance of effectively promoting your work in a limited amount of space.
Below, you can see how Twenty Over Ten client, BPP Wealth Solutions LLC, shared an article on the topic of flood insurance to both their Twitter (image 1) and LinkedIn accounts (image 2) with the same link and picture but with slightly different wording to tailor to their different audiences.
Sharing on Facebook
Facebook has over 2 billion active users, so as a financial advisor why wouldn’t you want to promote your work on this platform?! When posting to Facebook remember that up to 10,000 characters can be used, but only the first 480 are visible on your fans timelines, so be sure to include the most important information up top. However, stats have shown that short and sweet is often the way to go! Posts with fewer than 50 characters in the description have proved to be more engaging than long drawn out posts.
So what is an ideal timeline for sharing your content on Facebook?
Day 1 – Share the link post, and ensure that you completely fill out the share/social settings in your Twenty Over Ten dashboard to make posting much easier.
Day 3 – Post a video summarizing your new blog post, which is something you can do that puts a face behind the work. Add some fun to it and let clients see what you are doing and the reasoning behind your post. Create a quick video of yourself summarizing the post, which you can even do with your phone, making it even simpler!
Day 7 – Turn your written blog content into an infographic! There’s no need to hire a designer to create an infographic. Instead, take a look at these recommended free infographic tools to create something quickly and eye-catching to accompany your new content.
Day 14 – Pose a question with a link to the post. This is a great way to get your followers involved and intrigue them. If they feel as though they can interact with you by answering something they know the answer to, then this can create a positive relationship that can either help generate more leads or make a relationship that is already there even stronger.
Tweet it Out!
Like Facebook, Twitter is a great way to reach a broad number of followers. With over 330 million monthly users, you are bound to generate leads when you post your content across this platform. Twitter is the original platform to use hashtags and the “@” symbol to speak/mention other users. Even though, they are now allowing users to tweet beyond the original 140 character limit, it’s still known as the platform where users can quickly compose a short message to get their point across.
Now that users can use more characters, it’s a great opportunity to provide more context with the chance to have better conversation, among many other positives. There are many ways to make this platform the most effective for your business and for sharing your content.
Day 1 – Tweet a link to your post. The more hashtags that are used, then the more searchable your content can become. At Twenty Over Ten, we generally use two to three hashtags on our posts to initiate and increase our search-ability, but posting too many hashtags can be obnoxious and honestly, not that helpful. The content can get lost in the amount of hashtags. It’s helpful to also have links to click within your post. With a free tool called Click to Tweet, you can create shorter, clickable links quickly and easily.
Day 1 (four hours later) – Change the text and tweet a second link to your post. The “lifespan” of a tweet is about 18 minutes, so it is wise to share your post more than once a day. It can be shared up to four times a day initially, but then slow the posts down to weekly and monthly as time goes on.
Day 3 – Share a clip of the same video you created for Facebook. Research has shown that sharing video on your social media platforms can increase: brand awareness, brand sentiment and purchase intent.
Day 14 – Share another link with an image. With this, you are showing more information about your content and including a similar image, but one that is different. Continue the conversation but by varying it up too.
LinkedIn is great for engaging with other businesses, owners, and others in a professional manner. Sharing your post with an image or a link is what works best on LinkedIn. Make sure that your post is personal and like other platforms, encourage your followers to engage and interact with what you have to say. The best times for you to post on LinkedIn are between the hours of 8 to 10 AM and 4 to 6 PM.
Share your blog post once for the initial promotion and then repeat the post once a week, and then reduce that rate to every two to three months on your LinkedIn profile.
Post to your company page and/or your showcase page depending on your content, but do so at different times or days. You should also consider sharing your blog content in appropriate groups, but use different text depending on the group and target audience, and post on different days and times. This is similar to sharing different content across all the different platforms, as an advisor, you need to tailor it to suit the needs and wants of each individual niche that you are working with.
Day 1 – Share the link post as an update, so that other groups and business can click on the link and see what you are sharing. This helps to start the initial engagement and conversation.
Day 1 (four hours later) – Share your post to LinkedIn Groups, which are are hubs which provide a place for professionals in the same industry to share content, ask questions, post and view jobs and make business contacts.
Day 7 – Similar to Facebook, share a quick tip infographic.
Scheduling Tools to Help
Right now we know you’re probably saying “Wow! That sure seems like a lot of posting!” Not to worry! We wouldn’t suggest you post all of this manually, that would be exhausting for even the most diligent social media guru and not a good use of your valuable time.
There are several tools that assist in scheduling your posts this way you can set your posts up ahead of time, so that you are not constantly scrambling to have something drafted and posted several times throughout the day.
At Twenty Over Ten, we are very involved in social media – sharing our blogs, webinars, demos and other content types while also using it as a tool to interact with our users and connect with new advisors. Some of the scheduling tools we recommend include:
- CoSchedule: This is an online marketing calendar that helps you organize and maintain your entire marketing schedule. You are able to implement an entire marketing strategy while creating a “unified workflow” for social, content, email, events. As a business advisor who is trying to balance many different clients at once, this is a great tool to keep things organized.
- HootSuite:With this tool, you have the ability to schedule your social media posts well in advance. So, instead of having to manually log into your social media accounts to post articles or various other content specifically at a certain time, you can utilize Hootsuite to schedule your posts in a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. We use this tool at Twenty Over Ten to schedule our Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook posts. With the amount of people that we interact with and how busy we become, this is an extremely useful tool.
- Hubspot: This tool provides marketing, sales, and CRM Software to grow your business by generating leads and managing your pipeline. They provide numerous products for specific business marketing goals to ultimately increase your online traffic and presence, which is great to use as an advisor, as you are not only managing clients and their finances, but still trying to marketing yourself and your company.
Struggling With What Content To Share on Social Media or via Email?
We are offering access to our content for advisors to use via Lead Pilot for 7-days completely free (even on our month to month plans).
