Actiance Funnels Approved Social Posts To Financial Advisors

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After helping financial services firms prevent financial advisors from posting anything they shouldn't to social media, compliance and archiving specialist Actiance is now pivoting to help them post more.

Financial services must work around compliance hazards to participate in social media, since anything their representatives publish that could be considered financial advice must be monitored and archived. Actiance, which has a history of working with these firms to manage other electronic communications such as instant messaging and unified communications, entered the social software market with Socialite, a tool that screens posts and manages LinkedIn profiles.

A new product, Socialite Engage, turns the approval process around, allowing a firm's marketing department to provide a library of preapproved posts advisors can post to one or more social profiles.

"In probably the last six to eight months, the focus has shifted," said Sarah Carter, vice president of marketing at Actiance. "Compliance is the easy side of things. Getting people to adopt social media is the challenge."

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"Within three weeks of enabling our advisors, more than 1,200 of them were using social media. Actiance helps us understand what content is the most relevant and allows our advisors to further build their social media presence," Mike White, marketing director at Raymond James, said in a statement.

Raymond James, which has been using the product since October, also provided a background interview on how the process works. Financial advisers do have the freedom to write their own posts, but Socialite routes the posts for a compliance department review prior to publication. Because the posts distributed from the content library have been preapproved, an advisor can immediately publish any of those to Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Advisors can't modify the preapproved posts, but they can add comments--in which case their comments get filtered through the Socialite compliance review process prior to publication, like any other post.

Besides ensuring compliance, this content distribution allows advisors to post more frequently than if they had to write the content themselves.

This distribution model mirrors that of Hearsay, which also has some financial services customers such as Farmers Insurance. Hearsay provides a general solution for national or global companies to execute a social media strategy through their local representatives.

Although Hearsay has stepped up its targeting of financial services companies, Carter said Actiance has the advantage of deeper industry experience. "The underlying principle behind all of the Actiance platform is compliance," she said.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard

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