At the top of the chapter, Craig pointed out that 61% of advisers using LinkedIn had acquired a client through the social network. This is an impressive number. LinkedIn is the only social network positioned as the network for professional connections. Facebook and Twitter are great places to generate business, but the people on those networks are more likely to be looking at pictures of their grandkids than looking for business contacts.
LinkedIn has a huge number of tools for professionals. One of the features that's really handy for financial professionals are LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn groups are basically clubs inside of LinkedIn centered around an industry or a topic. There are thousands of these groups, and the number of people in a group ranges from 5 to 50,000. Some of them are completely open to the public while others are fairly exclusive and require you to be accepted by the head of the group.
So what do people do in these groups? It's actually pretty simple. They start conversations on a message board, and then chime in when they have something to say regarding the topic.
Let's take a look at a smaller LinkedIn group, the Financial Planning Magazine group. Each one of these rows is a conversation, and below the conversation is a snapshot of the comments people in the group have made regarding the topic. Let's go ahead and click into one of these. From here, you can read people's comments, give your own feedback, and pose your own questions.
The most common use of LinkedIn groups is to hobnob with professionals and thinkers in your own industry, trading ideas and points of view. A lot of people use it as a sort of sharpening stone for crafting their own perspective, and that's how I use groups-- as a place to hear thoughtful people's ideas, and as a place to share my own experiences with other folks in the creative and digital marketing industry.
For the financial professional, there's some great groups out there. financial Advisor Network has 8,000 members, Independent Financial Advisor has 4,600 members, and there are dozens more. These people are typically sharing business-building ideas, and most of them are exclusive to financial professionals-- all great resources.
Trading ideas is all well and good, but I want to show you how to use groups to actually generate some business. A good amount of your prospects are in retirement or approaching it, so let's jump back into LinkedIn and run a quick search of groups. I'm going to type the word "retired" into the search bar and see what comes up.
OK. So there are over 800 groups with "retired" in their name or description. I'm going to go over to the side filter and just have it show me open groups. Open groups are groups that anyone can join.
OK. So that narrowed the list down to 200 or so. Just looking at the page, I can see that there's some big active groups in this list. Let's take a look at the one right at the top-- the US Veteran group.
What you'll find is that on any given day, people in these retired groups are starting conversations and posing questions about money, social security, and other topics that should be answered by a financial professional, and that financial professional should be you. If you're helpful enough, which should be really easy given your wealth of knowledge on the topic, you'll have a chance to build relationships and leads right from within the group.
Don't forget-- this is LinkedIn. People are here for business-related reasons. So to pass up the opportunity to network and hunt for prospects is really to pass up the opportunity for free leads.
