Prospective clients may make a decision to hire you even before they meet you, said Mike Byrnes, president of Byrnes Consulting. How? For many younger investors, they’re going to make the decision based on your “webutation”— or online reputation. So you better make sure you have a good online presence.
“We now live in a research society,” Byrnes said, during a session at the Financial Services Institute’s OneVoice conference in San Diego this week. “In a word of mouth industry, you want people talking about you.”
Byrnes was helping advisors improve their online reputation and social media skills today at a social media lab at the TD Ameritrade Institutional national conference today in San Diego, pictured here.
The first place next gen investors are going to look is on social media—your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages. They’re also going to look to see if the advisor’s mentioned on other people’s websites and in the online press. All of that makes up your webutation. And if they have a solid experience online and make a connection, they may decide to hire the advisor on the spot.
Why care about your webutation? Because it’s not going away. Here are some statistics, via Byrnes, that show just how much technology permeates our lives:
92% of the world’s data was created in just the past two years.
Today’s smartphone would have been the most powerful computer in the world in 1985.
120 million people in the U.S. now own smartphones, up 30 million in just one year.
More than 48 million people own a tablet, representing 300% growth from last year. It is the fastest growing electronic device ever created.
Facebook:
- Each week on Facebook more than 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared
- In November, 150 million unique visitors in the U.S.
- 10% of total minutes spent online.
20% of Google searches each day have never been searched for before.
182 million U.S. Internet users watched 38.7 billion online content videos in December.
84.9% of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.