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Practice Management > Marketing and Communications > Social Media

Hearsay Launches New Social Media Tool for Advisors

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Hearsay Social says it is rolling out a client engagement platform that helps advisors reach clients and prospects more easily and more quickly via social media, their websites, email and text messages. The tool, Hearsay 360, also lets broker-dealers see which advisors are most successful in using social media and other methods of communication, so the firms can share these best practices across their advisor force.

Given the rising popularity of robo-advisors and clients’ growing requirement for advisors to respond quickly to their communications, Hearsay expects that the platform should prove popular with clients.

“Google, Amazon and Facebook have set customer expectations for every industry, as evidenced by the rise of robo-advisors and direct-to-consumer online options in financial services,” said CEO Clara Shih, in a statement. “Advisors know they must modernize or risk becoming irrelevant, but they feel underserved or overwhelmed by existing digital marketing programs. Hearsay 360 makes it easy for even the most tech-averse advisors to be findable, proactive and responsive wherever their clients are, including on social, web, text and email.”

The platform gathers data on how clients are communicating with advisors on social media, advisor websites, email and text messaging, which gives advisors “a holistic view of clients’ digital behaviors,” according to the firm. The platform’s “predictive analytics [then] will suggest which client or activities an advisor should react to via an automated list of recommendations on what … is likely to be most effective.”

The tool works in conjunction with firms’ core enterprise systems, including compliance archives and corporate CRM systems. It can save advisors time and get rid of “guesswork,” for instance, by letting them know when clients have reacted or posted comments about the advisors’ social media content and then suggesting the best method of response, such as sending a personalized email.

“It’s proactive in the sense that an alert goes out for the advisor to act quickly, when a client comments on the advisor’s Facebook page,” said Meagan Hency, vice president of marketing for San Francisco-based Hearsay Social, in an interview.

Hearsay 360 is a web-based application, she explains, that also compiles all the alerts and prioritizes them: “Advisors can get alerts via emails, but generally they will pick them up on the [Hearsay] dashboard.”

Over the past year, the social media services firm has launched tools for advisor websites, text messaging and email.

The new platform pulls all the pieces together, according to Hency. “It lets all the apps speak to each other and prioritize tasks. In other words, it unites all the information on clients’ communications and channels … and gives the advisor a to-do list,” the executive explained.

For broker-dealers, the platform “gives them valuable and robust reporting, so they can see what advisors are doing across channels,” she adds. Firms can then focus on what their top-performing reps are up to and use this information to establish and share best practices.

“Our clients expect to be able to seamlessly communicate with their advisors across digital channels, but with a distributed advisor force in a highly regulated industry, this omnichannel client experience isn’t always easy,” said Janney Montgomery Scott President & CEO Timothy Scheve in a statement. “Thankfully, Hearsay Social delivers unique technology that makes digital easy for advisors, while providing the robust compliance and field management functionality that our firm needs.”

— Check out Clara Shih: Democratizing Financial Advice — The IA 25 on ThinkAdvisor.


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