Any sector, but specifically Financial services companies (Banks, Brokers, Fund Management Companies,…) need to use social technology to engage investors, and defend from top technology players (Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon,…) which are getting into the financial industry.

They´ve got millions of registered users and they know exactly who they are, what they want, and what they need in real time, so starting to offer massive financial services is likely to be the next step.

Big social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are no longer useful for brands because have grown so much that now users “Newsfeed” are completely overwhelmed with dozens of profiles they follow, so brands‘ updates are practically unobserved.

In Twitter is specially significant as a new tweet is published every few seconds, but in Facebook is even worse as everytime less brands pages’updates reach the audience (nowadays between 2 % and 6%), unless brands promote every single post paying money (“Pay to Play”).

Facebook organic reach tends to zero. Or you pay to promote your updates, or no follower will see them: “Pay to Play”.

In generic social networks people speaks about everything, and there´s any kind of audience. However, all market researches done by specialised agencies state that the future of social networks pass through niche communities where people share interests and common inquietudes.

The true engagement takes place in specialised communities where it exist common interests and a sense of belonging, so it turns out to be the best ecosystem for brands to get such affinity and engagement from people.

Unlike usual presence in external social networks, having a proprietary social network has the enormous advantage of having the contact data of registered users, and the legal permission to comunicate with them, which lets brands know their potential clients and run a one-to-one marketing with every of them.

So as a brand, we can build our proprietary database of all our followers and fans, who we want to convert into both our “Ambassadors” in the world, and, of course, into our clients.

A proprietary social network is the best way to know in depth and segment your potential clients as they express Who they are, and When-How-What they want.

Analysing audience behaviours in your social network, and getting into conversations with people, are the best marketing strategies a brand ever could do.

This business intelligence lets brands offer, from a unique platform, not only on demand tailored products and services to any type of users/clients, but to anticipate to customers needs, being able to be on time, and the first to serve customers.

Keeping a profile in an external social network forces brands to be dependent of such social network rules and functionalities. However, a proprietary social network provides total freedom and independency about contents, tecnology, rules, privacy statements, security, etc.

Within a proprietary social network brands decide the functionalities they want to offer to users, which kind of interactions they want users to state with them, and what kind of opinions and evaluations they want to receive from users.

Having a proprietary social network provides an undoubtable prestige and reputational value to the brand, as it demonstrates that it takes care about being permanentely connected to its stakeholders, so it has created a proprietary conversation ecosystem to cover users needs of information, support and relation.

And this has a direct impact in the sense of belonging, affinity and engagement of users towards the brand.

A proprietary social network allows measuring users navigation statistics to detect those topics, contents and sections most visited. This “Big data” critical info lets brands offer tailored products and services to every single user which exponentially increases the conversion rate from users to clients.

In the same way, a proprietary social network site lets brands analyze in depth the origin of the traffic coming to the site, so they can analyze the ROI and impact of their link building, and ads & marketing campaigns done in other social networks, blogs, media sites, etc.