6 Twitter Tips for Insurance Agents

If you are an insurance agent running a brokerage, time is likely a scarce commodity for you. With so many aspects of running your business to take care of, it’s hard to find the time to focus on anything else.

When you think about something like using Twitter to promote your business and increase your leads, you may wonder whether it is worth it or whether it is just a waste of time. However, it is important to know that Twitter is not a waste of time for insurance brokers. On the contrary, it can give you a soapbox that you can use to spread your message to a mass audience that you might not have even dreamed of in the past.

The important thing to remember, however, is that Twitter must be used correctly to be effective (as is the case with all social media platforms).

Twitter is very fast paced, so it is important to respond within the right time frame in order to get on top of topics and keywords that are trending. Although you need to respond quickly, your tweets should always be useful, intelligent and align with your brand values.

Here are some important things that you should remember when you are representing your insurance broker business on Twitter.

1. Don’t Just Tweet About Yourself
One of the big mistakes that many insurance brokers make when using Twitter is that they only tweet links to their own content. Sure, you can use Twitter to promote yourself. However, using your account for only self-promotion will be spammy and selfish. You should also be sharing the tweets, blog posts and content of other people as well.

It is also important to interact with your followers in a profound way. Twitter isn’t just about a platform for you to talk about your business, it is meant to be a way to connect with people. Try to get involved in the conversation and interact with people in a profound way. This can be a wonderful way to build a loyal following, rather than simply increasing your follower numbers.

2. Answer Customer Questions
Insurance is one of those businesses where there are a lot of myths and misconceptions about your product and customers might have questions before buying. You can encourage them to ask their questions on Twitter. This way, you can answer them quickly and easily. Not only will this help educate your customers about the insurance products that you offer, but it will also show your followers that you are helpful and responsive to your customers.

3. Share relevant industry updates
Communicating a current issue that business owners should be made aware of. It also provides a great platform to open up discussion and potentially answer any questions people may have.

4. Figure out How People Perceive You on Twitter
The “lists” function is an interesting aspect of Twitter. You can add people to a list in order to organise your Twitter feed and group together users who tweet about a particular topic.
You can also follow someone else’s list, which will get you on their radar and also give you a feed specific to a particular theme. You can also find out what public lists you have been added to by clicking on “Member Of” on your lists page. The interesting thing about knowing what lists you are on is that it will give you an idea of how you are perceived on Twitter. For example, perhaps you tweet a lot of interesting and relevant news stories and people have started adding you to “News” or “Current Events” lists.

5. Use Hashtags in Your Bio
Hashtags are a crucial part of Twitter. They allow users to sift through the enormous number of users and tweets and find something relevant to them. You should use hashtags in your tweets whenever you can, but you should also use them in your twitter bio. When you have a hashtag in your bio, this means that when someone searches for that hashtag, your Twitter account can be found more easily. You might find that it results in more interested followers.

6. Use a Twitter Tool
There are numerous tools out there that make using Twitter easier and more efficient. For example, TweetDeck allows you to see all of your messages and tweets at once in a very well laid out dashboard with several columns. You can also set up custom columns so that you can monitor a hashtag, a keyword or a list. This allows you to manage your feed a little more easily and see more tweets at once. 

Another great tool is Buffer. It will analyze your Twitter statistics and find the most effective times for you to post tweets so that they have the best chance of being seen by a higher number of followers. Then, you can put together a “queue” of tweets that will be scheduled to be released at those specific times. So, you can tweet around the clock at scheduled intervals, even when you are sleeping. This is great because your tweets will have the potential to be seen by more people, compared to if you did a burst of tweeting at one time every day.

There are many Twitter tools out there, so take a look at the options to see which ones are best for your needs.