Social media has evolved into one of the most powerful tools financial advisers can leverage to raise their business profile, enhance trust, influence people and be front and center of people’s minds. It’s how you demonstrate expertise without a full-on sales pitch.

But for many advisers, social media is a whole new world. One that’s challenging to navigate and, importantly, is time consuming and difficult to keep up with – especially when they are busy helping clients achieve their financial goals.

Acknowledging the challenge advisers face, we’ve put together a brand new six-week social media course for Sesame members, to demystify this esoteric world Turning Content into Clients offers practical, adviser-focused one-hour sessions revealing best-use practices, how to effectively leverage platforms, while clearing up any common misconceptions.

Launching on Friday 12 June and running on six consecutive weeks thereafter, the course is all about removing friction, building skills and boosting confidence so advisers can learn how to transform their social media outreach into an easy, repeatable activity – not a headache.

Why we’ve created the course

Today’s advisers have more pressure on their time than ever before. Client communication. Admin. Compliance. Regulations. It all adds up. Marketing – notably social media marketing – often slips to the bottom of the priority list.

Not because advisers don’t recognise its value, but because they don’t have an in–depth understanding of social media skills – or the time to invest in learning how to maximise their LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram accounts.

Feedback from our members has echoed this. You’d like to use social media to improve their business, but don’t know where to start.

This is why we designed this course. It’s not about teaching people everything they need to know about social media. It’s about educating advisers of the essentials. The shortcuts.

The course isn’t content-heavy; it’s a social media snapshot. One that helps advisers:

• Understand what works on social media in today’s climate

• To create content efficiently, in bulk, with less effort – and stress!

• Build a visible, professional presence that audiences gravitate to and interact with

• Remain compliant, without sacrificing creativity

In addition, Turning Content into Clients is built with our brand-new adviser portal, OneView — which simplifies social media approvals for advisers, allowing you to get your message out quicker and with greater efficiency — in mind.

Breaking barriers

For many advisers, compliance considerations are one of the most challenging areas to navigate – and this is highlighted by social media. We’ve been working hard to simplify and streamline the approval process, so our advisers don’t face barriers to social media success, become discouraged, or give up altogether.

Our new ‘single source of information’ that we launched recently, OneView, streamlines and simplifies approvals, making them quicker and simpler, reducing admin time while highlighting clear guidelines to sharing social media content that gets traction, attention and engagement.

The Turning Content into Clients course perfectly complements this. By combining practical social media training with clearer processes, we aim to break down barriers to social media success, allowing advisers to confidently and clearly, consistently and compliantly communicate with audiences across different social media platforms.

What the course covers

• How to create a social media system that works

• Posting the ‘right’ content

• Turning an idea into a week or month of quality content

• Understanding what resonates with audiences

• Reducing research time

• Creating reusable templates to save time

The course will place significant emphasis on shortcuts. Those small process changes businesses can make to turn social media outreach into 20-minute, bite-size, digestible tasks, not taxing, time-consuming duties that detract from what advisers should really be doing.

A flexible course you can dip in and dip out of

Our six‑week social media course is thoughtfully designed, with standalone subjects that connect to form a cohesive whole.

There is no obligation to attend every session. People can attend all, or as many sessions as they’d like. Although we’d particularly recommend that everyone attend sessions two and five, you can dip in and out of the sessions you feel most appropriate. Each session operates as an independent lesson with a specific focus; therefore, some may be more relevant than others.

To make things even easier, all sessions will be recorded and made available on the Your Learning Hub so you can rewatch anything you need to, and also train up new advisers to your business when they join in future.

Staying on top of your social media

One of the biggest challenges facing advisers – or anyone using social media to showcase who they are and what they can do – is the rapid evolution of the applications.

What works today may not work next month. Algorithms shift. Best practice evolves. Favoured content formats, e.g., short-form video content, change. Older content formats, like tweeting (in the days before Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it) become less relevant. And, importantly, different platforms are more relevant to some sectors than others.

Staying on top of your social media is a continual process, which is why it can feel like a full-time job – and why this course is just the introduction of our commitment to helping advisers to become social media fluent.

Following the conclusion of the six-week course, Chris will be hosting quarterly update sessions to help advisers bolster their knowledge and stay prepared for:

• Changes to platform algorithms

• Emerging content formats

• Shifts in audience behaviour

• Updated adviser best practice

These sessions are designed to help advisers stay one-step ahead of the competition by knowing how to efficiently leverage social media marketing to promote who they are and what they can offer existing and potential new clients.

Designed for advisers, not social media marketers

Our six-week course has been well-thought out to combat the real-world challenges Sesame members face when looking to social media to grow their businesses.

Rather than adding to members’ workloads, Turning Content into Clients has been designed to optimize your social media marketing resources (including time and level of expertise). It acknowledges the constant adviser resource squeeze while delivering a course that caters to exacting compliance standards and the need to communicate clearly, confidently and professionally, while building credibility and trust.

Most importantly, the course helps advisers feel more confident in all their social media interactions, safe in the knowledge that what they share is clear, compliant, impactful, and — importantly — influential.

Meet the host: Chris Targett

The course is spearheaded by industry-leading social expert, Chris Targett – founder of Social for Brokers, a digital content creation agency that works closely with mortgage brokers to increase their social media footprint with engaging content.

Chris has a wealth of experience helping mortgage and financial advisers leverage social media to strategise and deliver content campaigns that are compliant and add real value to mortgage and financial advisers.

Through a practical, straightforward and direct approach, Chris cuts through the myths, jargon, and complexity of social media marketing in the finance and mortgage sectors, focusing on what’s most impactful so brokers can optimise their time and build social media platforms that set them apart from the competition.

What Chris brings:

• Deep understanding of the adviser market

• Real-world testimonials of what works

• Simple frameworks advisers can use immediately

• Strong ethos that emphasizes consistency over perfection

Chris understands that advisers don’t need more noise – they need clearer shortcuts and realistic systems than you can reuse for consistent, stellar results.

A small investment and a big return

Social media doesn’t need to be overwhelming, confusing, or a complete resource drain. With expert guidance, clearer processes and practical shortcuts that make the whole exercise swifter and more manageable, Turning Content into Clients will help you to supercharge your social media marketing.

This unique six-week course equips advisers with the tools they need and the support they’ve been looking for to create and share valuable content across all their social media platforms, and, ultimately, grow their businesses.

Book your sessions today

Members should visit the Events page on MySesame to book your sessions and learn how to navigate the evolving world of social media.