for Financial Advisors
June 1, 2010
Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
As a financial advisor, your reputation is one of your most important prospecting tools. While the internet presents a wealth of marketing benefits for financial advisors, one downside is potentially losing control of your reputation. Here’s how to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Traditional word-of-mouth and public relations have moved online to blogs, blog comments, forums, and social media channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. With more web-based outlets popping up every day, managing your reputation online is daunting. Fortunately, the latest social media applications have taken reputation management and traditional PR to a whole new level – and these applications provide a number of surefire methods for effectively managing your name and reputation ... so long as you are willing to stay on top of it.
When consumers research financial advisors, their first stop will be a search engine such as Google. As such, the top search results affect their ultimate hiring decision. Good reputation management demands that you not only appear high in these results, but that the results are positive.
Here is an example of poor reputation management: The third result from a Google search for “Home Depot customer service” is a page entitled “Consumer Complaints about Home Depot Customer Service.” Returning this kind of information so highly in search results is harmful to the business in question.
But there are worse things than ‘negative’ search results: For instance, having a competitor’s website appear higher in search results even when the prospect has searched for your name! Or if a search on your name or your firm’s name produces no results at all.
With social media channels like LinkedIn and Twitter, you can create reams of positive content that will appear when you are “Googled.” In the unlikely event that negative content fouls your reputation online, the positive content featured on these social media channels can rank higher in your search results – mitigating the potential harm of negative search results. Whether you wish to manage your online reputation or simply create more search results for your business, here’s how to get started.
Display article as PDF for printing.
Would you like to send this article to a friend?
Remember, if you have a question or comment, send it to .
