Financial adviser Robert Lewis has launched a company called Elevate to help advisers grow their own business through social media.
Mr Lewis, director of operations for Flintshire-based Heritage Financial Solutions and managing director of the new company, said advisers often struggled to know how to do their own marketing, online administration, or use social media effectively.
The rationale behind Elevate, Mr Lewis said, was to "help financial advisers and small businesses benefit from social media in the same way Heritage has over the past three years."
He said: "One of my core strengths has always been search engine optimisation. It has allowed me to create websites that have enabled good search engine rankings and delivered good traffic.
"I believe traffic is fundamentally one of the most important things to get right to sell products or services.
"However, I have noticed and experienced more online traffic is now directed from social media profiles, so I asked the question 'How can small to medium sized businesses, that don't have the budget or capacity, capture this potential?' That's why I created Elevate in conjunction with a small team."
While Mr Lewis said he recognised Elevate was "not the first" social media company to be created, "and probably won't be the last", he said his history and experience meant the company could "look at things differently".
He said: "I have been in financial services since 2005 and understand the constraints of compliance, along with the red tape when it comes to trying to promote financial services online."
Elevate aims to help advisers launch their business into the world of financial technology (fintech) by providing a variety of functions to take the time and cost pressure off advisers.
The company can work on profile creation, to help those new to social media make sure their profile 'shop window' "hits the mark", according to Mr Lewis.
There is also a client support portal available from Elevate to help advisers with administration.
For example, advisers can engage their followers with ongoing content via social media, generate quotations for clients, create campaigns and keep an eye on open projects, open invoices, received and outstanding payments, open tasks, messages and events.
Mr Lewis commented that, each day, there are more than 500m tweets, 4.5bn Facebook 'likes' and 95m photos and videos uploaded to Instagram.
"Behind these staggering numbers", he added, "is a wealth of information about your customers: who they are, what they like, and how they feel about your brand."
simoney.kyriakou@ft.com
