I was lucky enough on 12th June to go to a Social Media in Finance event happening in London. An event held by James Saward-Anderson from Social Tree and it was definitely an educational and interesting day.
First hearing from Simon Kingsnorth, Marketing Lead, Digital Expert were he spoke about trends happening in Social Media. He spoke about how Social media has been around for 12 years now and it’s constantly been changing, which is something we all know and see happening. Although Social Media isn’t very ‘Social’ anymore, it’s a business platform more than anything. Every time you go on Social Media now you will see someone trying to sell you something, whether you want it or not. This is where business’s have to now think more logically about using Social Media. They need to start personalising everything to their customers. No one wants to be showed or pushed at stuff they don’t want. They want companies to know what they want and show them what they want, otherwise they are just going to leave. Social Media is where you need to build trust and honesty with your customers, otherwise there will definitely be someone else out there your customers will trust more. The power is all in the customers hands in this day and age. Especially with social media being such an open platform, people could say one bad thing about your company online and thats it, everyones seen or heard it. As much as people love social media, it is a bad place.
A quote he said that I liked was; “Twitter is for someone with nothing to say, to say it to someone who’s not listening.” Which I believe is a great explanation of what twitter is because when you think about it, as much as its a good platform for business’s to talk to their customers, its also where people just get their worries out. Almost like a diary.
Simon also spoke about how as businesses we need to come out of this digital age and back into human age. Having actually conversations with people, face to face. Making it more personal, making customers trust you and feel like they are a part of your journey. We need to start talking to people, not at them.
A trend that he recons needs to become a thing is Vertical video because the way people watch and look at their phone is holding it vertically, not horizontally like how everyone does videos now. So why are we making everyone turn their phones round when we could be complying to what they are already watching?
Simon Kingsnorth also thinks that Social Media will soon become a closed community throughout the years because people are getting tired of all these notifications coming through their phone, they just want a break from it. So much so that some hotels now are doing ‘No WIFI’ as a benefit for people who want to get away from everything. Which personally I think is a great idea because when you’re away you should be that, away, from everything. It’s no longer FOMO (Fear of missing out), its now JOMO (Joy of missing out). But if social media becomes a closed community it means that businesses are going to have to apply to this way, when trying to reach their audiences.
Camilia Vignaud from Linkedin also spoke at the event. Linkedin Vision and purpose is to connect worlds professionals to make them more productive and create economic opportunity for everyone. they already have 630Million + professionals on LinkedIn, with there being 2 members a second creating an account. And an amazing 9 Billion impressions per week on LinkedIn.
She explained why people would come to Linkedin.
1 – Industry News
2 – Expert advice
3 – Selected influencers
4 – Job postings
5 – Online course learning (Which is a new thing that Linkedin are now doing for there members)
Linkedin is also the most trust worthy social media app out there at 48% trust worthy. Compared to Twitter (19%), Facebook (24%), Instagram (22%) and Youtube (4%).
Camilia also said how companies should all be mobile first, which is an important thing especially within this decade because everyone is on their phones. Plus 80% of Linkedin sponsored content comes from mobile devices, so if it doesn’t look good on your phone, you’re not going to get as good statistics from it.
Matthew Barclay, Area Director for the UKI – Meltwater spoke about marketing and social within finance companies. Saying how customers demand a smarter and digital service now with 69% of customers wanting financial on digital channels. This means that the customer experience going forward needs to be more productive as you need to make sure that nothing within your website or app is going to go wrong. It needs to be easy for customers to work it out.
He said that marketing is no longer about the stuff you make but about your stories. Customers will trust an individual more than a brand now. Customers want to feel like they are coming along the journey with you and knowing your stories is how to do it.
Damian Horner from Real Vision spoke about videos, especially with how they can help finance companies more now. He said how more businesses especially financial, need to act like a media communications company to be able to keep their customers interested and to keep up with the latest trends.
Within videos he spoke about how the saying that no ones got an attention spam anymore is a lie. That if you are interested in something you will watch it and watch it to the end. It’s not that people don’t have attention spams, it’s whether or not you do it in an interesting way to keep their attention and keep them interested. A way to do that is to think about audience psychology because people care about what impacts them, personally. Damian also spoke about stories, saying how people want to understand why you are doing what your doing, they want that journey of your company. They want to be apart of it.
Tim Hyde was one of my favourite talks. He worked at The Ladbible, then Social chain and now owns his own Marketing Agency. He spoke about why people especially companies invest in social media.
- Trackable results
- Omni channel approach
- Quickly build brand equity
- Integrates well with other media
- Data driven
- Low barrier to entry
Making sure you invest and allocate your budget to the right channel is always a good start with social media as well because you don’t want to be wasting your time on something thats never going to work for your company.
He spoke about how a good way to get your customers to feel like they are part of your journey is to reward them with insights of your company. Show them what you are up to, bring them along for the journey.
I learnt a lot going to this event and really enjoyed myself. Working within the social media and marketing industry, this information will help me a lot with going forward in my career. Two things that should be taken away from this event is that, the customer journey is very important and Less is more on social media.
RachelWrites 
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