Not yet sure what your firm should do regarding social media.  Here’s a suggestion that you cannot afford to forgo… Listen.  Why?  This simple step carries with it no regulatory guideline adherence concerns, provides an opportunity to assess how other advisors are utilizing social networking sites and generates valuable feedback on what your clients and prospects are thinking, saying and doing when it comes to personal investing.   Best of all, it costs you nothing. 

If your firm’s social networking policy does not yet allow for actively engaging constituents, this is an excellent means of investing your time to further your understanding of the role social media might play in your firm’s practice development plan.  For those advisors already actively engaged in social networking, monitoring the conversations that are taking place on social networking sites will yield numerous insights that can shape your approach.  Chief among the items which will benefit from your learning in this area will be the content which your firm crafts for distribution in the digital marketplace as part of your marketing and communications efforts.    

Additionally, you will likely gather important feedback on investors’ social media usage, behaviors and interactions.  There are a host of monitoring and analytics solutions that may come into play, many of which are free.  Applications such as Google Alerts, Twitter Advanced Search and HootSuite provide easy to use tools that will allow you to gather information on your firm, its products and services, your target audience and competitors, enhance prospect intelligence gathering, assess the reach, tone and passion of consumer commentary and when you’re ready, to push updates across multiple social media accounts.    

One of the more interesting dimensions of “listening” is the ability to solicit direct feedback from industry peers and or consumers.  Posing direct questions to communities and groups on specific topics is one of the most timely cost efficient means of conducting market research available to businesses today.  Interested in learning more about social media monitoring?  Check out this article on Forbes.com