Cheltenham

Hello – and welcome to the latest installment of our mini series about Cheltenham folk using social media. Today we are talking to Louise from Assureweb who seems to be having a great time with Twitter!

The interview

For anyone who doesn’t already know about Assureweb, what’s your business about?
 
Assureweb is a Cheltenham based financial services technology business, employing around 85 members of staff. We aggregate and distribute life & pensions products to financial advisers using the latest internet technologies either via our own website www.assureweb.co.uk or through deep integration with technology partners. You could describe our website as Compare the Market for financial advisers. In the future we will be more like “Intel inside” as we power our technology partners, enabling them to  compare the market in their own right, with Assureweb almost invisible to the financial adviser.
 
So Louise, how do you use social media and what got you interested?
 
I use social media to keep in touch with our customers. It’s a great way to listen to what’s happening in the financial services industry, while letting people know what good things we’re up to.
 
I have a Twitter account which I would say is our main tool, some key members of staff have set up their own business Twitter accounts too. I think between us we provide a nice overview of the focus of the company. We also have an Assureweb profile on LinkedIn, I feed my tweets into my profile using RSS. I’ve set up a Facebook profile page, but I think it’s more appropriate for consumer facing products and services so I just feed in my tweets using RSS and monitor it.
 
I’ve always been interested in technology from a young age, in recent years it has revolutionised the way we communicate. Being in Marketing and working for a technology company I think it’s essential to keep up to date with how people use the Internet. I saw an opportunity in Twitter so set up an account last year. We quickly saw momentum building with customers and prospects following us and retweeting our promotional messages to their followers. It’s now an intrinsic part of our marketing activity and ties in neatly with our PR strategy.
 
Have you noticed any appreciable benefits from using social media? If so, what are they?
 
We’ve seen a prospect client get in touch after seeing us on social media. They liked our proposition and picked up the phone.

In the current climate it’s important to stand out from the competition and I think we’ve been able to do that through social media. In essence, we’re winning new business because of social media.
 
We’ve also offered support to our customers who have tweeted queries to us, we have received some fantastic feedback from this. We see it as another way of making our customer’s lives easier by offering excellent levels of Customer Service.
 
We’ve had lots of positive feedback. I think people are impressed that we’re one of the few financial services technology businesses using social media.
 
If you could give a single piece of advice to anyone about social media what would it be? Or, Do you have a burning question about using social media?
 
My advice would be to have confidence in the power of social media, remember that it’s not just about being heard; it’s about listening to what’s important to your customers.
 
And how should people follow you online? 
 
You can follow me on www.twitter.com/assureweb