Hearsay Social says it has launched new social media applications for iPhones and Android devices. The new apps means financial advisors can interact with clients more easily and quickly while also following their firm's policies and industry rules, the company said early Friday,.
"As scale becomes more and more critical to financial advisors, they want to use our product when they are on the go, which is a lot of the time," said Steve Garrity, chief technology officer and founder of Hearsay Social, in an interview with ThinkAdvisor.
"We continually get their encouragement for more speed and seamlessness of the [social media] experience. These apps make things really seamless," Garrity explained. "They can get an email from us with preapproved content, open an app and publish the content easily to their social networks. Anything they want to do on social media, they can do from a phone and do so seamlessly. This is the next level of improvement in our mobile offering."
The mobile apps also alert advisors when their clients, prospects and colleagues have important life events, so the FAs can take action quickly on such information, according to Hearsay, which has more than 100,000 advisors, insurance agents and other financial services professionals as customers.
"Especially on mobile devices, small interactions are so important," said Hearsay's CTO. "You can just glance at the phone and then do your task" on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, while doing another activity.
Advisors and other clients "deserve good software on their phones for social media," he adds. "Mobile forces us all to up our game even more, and even five seconds makes a difference in someone's day. That's why speed really matters to us."
As of last year, 40% of cellphone owners were accessing social networks on these devices, and nearly 30% do so on a typical day, according to Pew Research.
"I am on my iPhone for calls and checking emails about 90% of the time …," said Jason Graham, regional marketing director at Penn Mutual, in a statement. "The app allows me to capture content more readily and post to my LinkedIn account at a moment's notice. The functionality is fantastic, and it provides the speed that is needed to put material out there in the fast-paced environment I work in."
As more and more work is done on phones, advisors and other financial professionals – who run their practices like small-business owners – want to be responsive wherever they are," said Garrity.
