Building a cutting-edge social media presence seems to be the initiative du jour at many wealth managers, but firms must grasp that it is part of the relationship management process and not merely another distribution channel, Andrew Haigh, managing partner, entrepreneurs at Coutts, warned at a recent conference.

“This [social media] is not just another distribution channel… that’s a fatal error,” Haigh told delegates at the Future of Private Banking Conference last week in London.

As he said, and as watchers of the industry will know, Coutts thinks a lot about the segmentation of its clients, dividing them not just by asset base and domicile, but also profession and source of wealth. And according to Haigh, this approach remains “a good differentiator.” But as well as this, a vigorous approach to segmentation is also advantageous in terms of building a social media presence, he said.

Building communities

The key to Coutts’ social media strategy is the idea of building communities, said Haigh, explaining that the entrepreneurial client segment is a great example of how firms can use social media to their best advantage.

When formulating its strategy the bank looked at the “entrepreneurial journey” as its starting point, said Haigh, meaning the trajectory a entrepreneur’s business (and life) will take from an initial idea, to starting and growing a business and eventually transitioning through to an eventual sale or transfer. Cognisant of the swarm of firms which will approach a business owner when a “liquidity event” is looming, Coutts decided to target clients in the phase of growing their business up to exit. This has formed the backbone of the bank’s social media strategy for entrepreneurs.

Coutts’ first foray into cultivating its digital media presence was in 2008, when the firm started to actively manage its Wikipedia entry. Then in 2010 the bank launched on Twitter, YouTube and 4Square, before going live on Facebook in the summer of this year.

This type of gradual roll-out is absolutely necessary, Haigh said, as “you can’t just suddenly switch this on.” Another factor that branding and marketing executives will be only too aware of is that it can often it can be hard to make a solid enough business case for social media efforts at a strategic level. “It’s difficult to put a financial value on the gains,” he said, but also noted that although such efforts can be time-consuming they are also “quite inexpensive.”

“Softly, softly”

If securing “buy-in” for social media development at a corporate level is largely a gradual process, so is gaining currency and making inroads with clients and prospects, explained Haigh. And this is particularly the case with entrepreneurs, he said. With this segment, “it’s a mistake would be to go straight out there and pronounce as an authority… you have to be ‘softly, softly,” he said.

Coutts’ approach is to avoid didacticism, rather the bank sees itself as a “facilitator in a process” collating input and tips from the entrepreneurial community and relaying it back, Haigh explained. The bank also carries out a lot of research to help the entrepreneurial segment, and recently published work on the case for management buyouts versus trade sales, for example. An emphasis on collaboration also means that the bank is keen to thoroughly involve the entrepreneurial community – via their involvement in focus groups and surveys – not just by presenting finished research to them. Starting a dialogue through reports and research, as well as involvement in the Growing Business Awards, Global Entrepreneurs Week UK and other celebrations of success, are key to the bank’s strategy.

As Haigh points out, this knowledge-sharing approach is not only more engaging for clients – many of whom are of course experts in business themselves – it also helps to build intellectual capital among Coutts’ bankers who serve this segment. As such, private bankers become able to “speak like entrepreneurs”, he said.

Twitter takes off

As well as its web content aimed at the entrepreneurial community, Coutts is also finding success with Twitter, which it uses to support its publications and sponsorships, as well as to drive new business more directly. The bank already has quite a few clients engaging and sending direct messages; on the other side, individual bankers are tweeting, directly replying to messages and also following clients and prospects. This last element of the mix is incredibly useful in reaching out to prospects, he added, as an entrepreneur of the calibre of, say, Richard Branson, will often do their own tweeting, while emails and telephone calls will of course be vigorously screened or handled by someone else.

Haigh is only too aware of the regulatory concerns that firms may have over their bankers “tweeting” without the intervention of communications departments, but he says while you have to worry about this, you shouldn’t worry too much. As he points out, you can’t police what a banker says at a client dinner, for example, and so you just have to “believe in your people and that they’ve got the right education and training.” In any case, when using social media to target entrepreneurs regulatory concerns don’t run as high as content tends not to be anything that could be construed as investment advice. Nonetheless, his broad advice is: “never tweet about products or rates, or re-tweet anything that could be seen as advice or endorsement.”

Cultivating a conversation

He also advises firms examining their social media use to ask themselves, “is this really a conversation?” – and that conversation is just as much between clients as it is with the bank. One other interesting direction that Coutts is persuing with social media is the development of “closed-community apps” which will allow a client segment to directly interact with others in a similar position – this Haigh says is very much the bank’s “end game.”

What is clear is that the “classic” style of website is simply not enough for today’s technology-savvy high net worth individuals. “Everyone now has websites but you have to use them to drive engagement…too many people just throw content at people.” Interactivity is key, and in Haigh’s opinion, “Facebook gives a sense of where the classic website will need to go.”

It is rapidly becoming evident that an engagement-focused social media strategy like this is starting to look like best practice in the modern world – but how the industry as a whole will navigate these relatively unchartered waters remains to be seen. What is certain however is that no firm can afford to shun social media in today’s age and that frontrunners in this area are likely to garner increased wallet share. As Haigh puts it, “watch this space for the next couple of years.”