It's become the new norm to be directed to an official social media page when you visit most business websites. Why? There are 3.2 billion active internet users worldwide, roughly 45% of the world population. This figure is an honest answer to why businesses are now engaging prospective customers on their social media platforms.

With the expansion of the digital space, all spectrums of industry have become more interactive in their social media platforms to net potential clients. Recruiting within social media platforms varies from sector to sector. The focus here will be on the financial sector professionals and how the LinkedIn platform has been essential in helping them recruit potential clients.

Why LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is the largest professional social media platform with over 675 million members. It boasts executives from every Fortune 500 company as its members. With this portfolio of members, what could be a better platform to source new clients for banks, insurance companies and brokers, mutual funds, and other financial services industry professionals?

With this magnitude of endless possibilities for recruiting potential clients, many professionals and institutions within the financial services sector have increased their LinkedIn interaction. This is attributed to the unprecedented opportunity to engage and impart knowledge to clients and prospective clients. When deployed, the strategies below can aid the financial advisors in recruiting prospective clients from LinkedIn.

Networking and Connection Building

Networking and connection building is the primary focus of LinkedIn as a platform. Target audiences for financial services professionals are not only members of LinkedIn; they are also active members. Knowing this, financial sector professionals should aim to build their networks and make as many relevant connections on LinkedIn as possible. These connections help build relationships with potential and existing clients. Consistent and relevant networking leads to expanding influential centers, which helps create a pool of appropriate referrals to potential clients.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn aims to aid professionals in all sectors to connect with potential clients and relevant professionals who can help enlarge the scope of reach. The LinkedIn Sales Navigator assists in recruiting prospective clients for financial advisors within all spectrums of the financial services sector.  The Sales Navigator improves the recruitment of potential clients by:

• Filtering potential clients by industry. This helps bring out only the relevant prospective clients.
• Expanding the referral network. This connects both potentially responsive and unresponsive clients through lead generation.
• Identification of prospective triggers. Triggers are used to educate and create a reason for a subsequent need.

Content and Knowledge Sharing

Content is key. As a financial advisor, you already have a LinkedIn page and have made some relevant connections on LinkedIn. But that alone will not help you net prospective clients. Joining relevant LinkedIn groups and constantly sharing content that appeals to your target market will help recruit prospective clients.

The purpose of sharing content is to expand your reach as a financial advisor. This helps recruit new clients since many users will view the content. If they see the relevance to a need, chances of initiating contact increase.

The Bottom Line

There is no doubt that LinkedIn as a social media platform provides invaluable opportunities for professionals and organizations in the financial services industry to recruit prospective clients. The platform has expanded the scope of client recruitment digitally, and this has worked to the advantage of digitally savvy businesses, including financial service providers.

Financial service professionals should realize that prospective clients are looking for them on LinkedIn now more than ever. With this knowledge, advisors should embrace the use of LinkedIn now more than ever as the risk lies more in not embracing it.