Insurance industry eyes social networking

Posted by Aaron Brockhurst on 5 July 2009

Tags: social networking, twitter, youtube, facebook, myspace, insurance

Whilst suffering the heat on London Underground last week I manage to read a copy of "Insurance Times" that someone had generously left behind. Had it not been for the Facebook and Twitter images I would have passed on this opportunity and read the copy of The Sun that was left on the chair next to it.

Since Dell announced just how much revenue they were generating from Twitter we've seen a significant increase in interest in Social Networking and we're spending more time with clients working helping them integrate Twitter, Facebook and youTube into their current marketing and web strategies. Recently I was fortunate enough to give a presentation to a group at a BRX Breakfast meeting on "What are Twitter, Facebook and youTube?" and get reactions from this group. I was not surprised that only about half of the group had heard of Twitter, Facebook or youTube or that the majority had no idea what they actually were or how to use them as a marketing communications tool. Out of 20 people at the meeting only 2 had Twitter accounts and one of those was a client who we are working with on raising their profile.

What was interesting and corresponded with Insurance Times is that it's not just the financial services industry that have been slow on the uptake of these new marketing channels. Like the people at the meeting I've found that Insurance Companies are very good at networking socially. As one of our clients put it recently, "We do social networking the old fashioned way". There's nothing wrong with the "old fashioned" way of networking. I find spending time with people much more beneficial to building relationships that last. However, and this is the point that Insurance Times are making, you ignore new marketing channels at your peril and technology has opened new channels for a great many people to communicate on. At EMC's Momentum 07 conference in Monaco Nike talked about the differences in communication methods between Generation Y and Generation X and the latter are more used to communicating through these new channels.

Like all other forms of marketing online Social Networking is not a "5 minutes and it's done" job. It needs focused activity to effectively identify your community, communicate the message and have the controls in place to monitor the success. Unlike offline marketing you can actively monior the effectiveness of your campaign in near real time, tracking everything from the number of clicks from your Tweet through to the conversion rate in your ecommerce store. This tracking gives you the ability to make changes during your campaign to improve it's effectiveness. Do it right and like Dell you can generate significant revenue from these chanels, do it wrong and you can adjust and change what you're doing, dont do it at all and you could well be waving goodbye to lost business.

Read the Insurance Times article for yourself. It has some great information that can be easily applied to any business thinking of adding Social Networking to their marketing channels.