Financial social media: Why traditionally conservative financial services companies have chosen to embrace the internet and social marketing.

In a bad economy, social media companies have been one of the few industries that have been rapidly increasing in value. There have been a number of companies that have offered IPOs and where we've seen so many industries hit by layoffs, tons of new social media companies are hiring and it seem like a new one is launched each week. A subsection of this has been the financial social media market which has increased even more rapidly. It's also an exciting market because the companies know that people using those products for financial services related reasons likely have money and are much more valuable than some other social media customers. The philosophy of social media has been based around that companies know people value the opinions of their friends and families and co-workers a lot more than they trust advertising. Although advertising works, people have an implicit distrust of being sold to while people assume that people they are close to have more pure motives. Given that premise, financial companies realize how important it is to build a strong brand that gets great word of mouth. That will lead to good recommendations and easier sales to new customers. Not only will the business be easier to obtain using social media compared to traditional channels, but the sales will tend to be larger. In the financial industry, a lot of customers will be very careful initially. But if they know that a family member or their boss has had a great experience, they are more likely to commit more money. This isn't a new idea, but financial social media has made it a lot easier to engage these customers. Also in this economy, obviously many people are unhappy with their financial institutions so they are ripe to possibly be poached from competitors. For many years, financial industries were really hesitant to go after the internet market. It's not that they didn't want new business; it was just assumed that the biggest customers (who would lead to the biggest commissions) wouldn't be obtained online so it wasn't worth pursuing. In this economy and in a world where everyone is online and people do most of their research on the internet, the financial industries have had to adapt. And, the traditionally old fashioned financial industry was more conservative then but they've quickly adapted and gone after social media markets. Financial Social Media has made our investing abilities much more efficient and easier. With these technologies, we're able to analyze information a lot more quickly. People are also, most importantly able to see what their associates and companies they are interested in are promoting. The financial world is too big for anyone person to research it alone. Financial social media allows a lot more information to be considered. With that rise in popularity, companies can't help but continue to expand into this market, which only drives the popularity of the sites in addition.