When I’m not on the road spreading the good word of social media and financial services, then you can find me sweating behind the handle bars of a fake bike listening to awesome music. I love to spin. Fortunately, I work with several people who also enjoy spinning.
As I was walking to get some water, I stopped by a co-workers’s cube and asked her if she was going to spin on Saturday. She wasn’t sure and said, “I will message you on Facebook and let you know.” I nodded my headed, took a few steps to the water cooler and then thought, “How many people did this today?”
Messaging has become a relevant verb in our daily lives. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and even Pinterest all have messaging features that allow people to communicate privately from the masses. So why not just email someone? Or text them? And how many people are actually doing this? So, let’s discuss.
Why not just email someone? Let me ask you a question: do you like receiving or sending email? Didn’t think so. Email has a lot of “baggage” that is just not attractive anymore. Lifehacker.com had a great article a year ago that talked about the different messaging apps and why people are attracted to them. You can find that piece here .
Messaging apps clean it all up and force users to get to the point (many of them limit your character space), they make use other apps like Dropbox for attachments and you can do it all within your favorite social networking platform so you don’t have to leave one to go to another. Efficient!
It’s important that financial service organizations recognize this trend and adapt. Many of the archiving and retention platforms like Smarsh, Actiance and Hearsay have already started and allow you to track these conversations compliantly by registering your accounts through their dashboard.
Why not text someone? Well, you could but that’s a separate application on your phone. People want to stay in the app that they are currently in and really do see email, text, message, etc.as unified communication methods that transcend one another. Compliance officers though…not so much that they agree with this thinking! They want everything SEPARATED!
Appending to my last point about email, archiving and retention platforms cannot track text messages. For that reason, many registered reps will see in their communication guidelines that text messaging is not allowed for business. This is where messaging apps could be more helpful. By keeping your messages on a monitored and controlled social networking platform like LinkedIn connected to Smarsh (or any variation of this) could serve you very well and even replace a large part of your texting.
How many people are messaging? In a word…LOTS! MarketingProfs just shared an article on the topic where Ayaz Nanji wrote about the data compiled by Flurry . These apps are being used more often than any other on the smartphone and their retention is supreme. [In other words, we think messaging apps are awesome and are going to keep using them!]
I think messaging apps are going to be the way of communication more often chosen by financial service professionals in the coming months . They are easy-to-use and we just need to get more monitoring around them so compliance feels comfortable about those isolated conversations. The apps themselves are definitely not going away though.
What are your favorite apps? Do you enjoy messaging? What do you like or not like about it? I encourage you to share in the comments below or reach out on social media and let us know.
Be bigger, better and more BIONIC today!