If your tone is informal rather than informative, Stephen Gazard, managing director of Sesame Bankhall Group, says you may regularly tweet about interactions you have during the day and feelings and thoughts on a variety of issues.
If you choose to take a more conventional approach, he says your communications may be limited to when you have something formal to announce. You may also find that one tool is more effective than another, so Mr Gazard suggests concentrating on this specific media.
“Google analytics for example can tell you if users are visiting your website from Twitter or finding you via Linkedin, etc. You can also use the tools themselves to monitor how many followers and hits your activity is generating.”
Nina Stenning, head of marketing communications at Openwork, says advisers should make a habit of tweeting each day and make sure they update their Facebook page several times a week.
“The more active you are, the more likely you are to get your content noticed on someone’s timeline, and ultimately ‘Liked’, ‘retweeted’ or commented upon, which can extend the reach of your post to that person’s friends/connections.
“If you don’t think you have the time to share regular updates, then choosing not to use social media may be the right decision for you. After all, an out-of-date or poorly maintained social media profile is probably worse than having no presence at all.”
Karen Barrett, chief executive of Unbiased, agrees that whatever time you can fit in to use social media is fine – it is consistency that is key.
Whether it is five times a day or once a week, Ms Barrett says make sure you don’t start off with a flurry of activity and then ignore your audiences on social media platforms.
“Slow and steady will always be a better way of communicating than all or nothing.”
Helen Turner, distribution and development director of Tenet, says advisers should make sure you they are posting engaging and interesting updates at least a few times every week to keep momentum up. But don’t post if you don’t have anything interesting to say.
“People who post for the sake of posting with uninteresting updates can result in an ‘unfollow’ and likewise ‘spammers’ who post hundreds of times a day are very unwelcome.”
Advisers should allocate some time each day to see what is ‘trending’ and start to engage with those in your group, according to Derek Bradley, chief executive of Panacea Adviser.
He also recommends a social media management dashboard like Hootsuite to monitor various channels of activity in one place.
