5 Social Media Trends in
the Insurance Industry

Insurance experts are well-aware of the fact that they need to pivot to social media platforms if they want to lure in additional customers, yet relatively few of them understand the latest social media trends that are upsetting the established ways of doing business in the industry. Rather than living in ignorance, insurance providers and professionals who are unfamiliar with the modern ways of reaching out to customers should be doing their homework so that they can copy successful social media strategies.

Here are 5 social media trends that have taken hold in the insurance industry, and why they’re so particularly effective when it comes to reaching out to everyday customers.

Insurance Mascots Are Sending Friend Request

One of the most notable social media trends taking hold of the insurance industry is the growing reliance on mascots. Many are doubtlessly familiar with the Geico Gecko and Flo from Progressive, yet few understand the extent to which these insurance mascots have mastered the digital realm. One mascot in particular, Allstate’s Mayhem, has enjoyed sustained audience engagement with his posts since his original debut on Facebook.

Mayhem’s Facebook page has accrued more than a million fans and regularly lures customers in with engaging posts that actually pique user interest. This is likely because the company pays for Facebook ads, which are expensive but generally product engagement results that are otherwise unattainable on the money-hungry platform. A review of Allstate’s use of Facebook to promote Mayhem is worthy of any insurance professional’s time if they want to copy the success of this popular mascot.

Using Social Media to Determine Premiums

One of the most interest fads going on in the digital world right now is the use of consumer metadata to make wiser business decisions than ever before. Previously, insurance companies were hard-pressed to determine which customers had riskier profiles than others, yet these days they can simply head over to popular social media channels in order to figure out what kind of lifestyle prospective customers enjoy. If you post photos of yourself in dangerous situations, such as vacation albums packed with mountain climbing photos, providers could assess you to be riskier and thereby force you to pay higher premiums.

The fact that life insurers are using social media posts to determine if you’re a risky client has generated some controversy thus far, but it’s unlikely that this trend will die out anytime soon. As long as providers avoid being overly discriminatory in how they use this data, they’ll likely be able to comb social media platforms for years to come.

Content Is Important, But It’s Being Posted Less Often

Insurance providers view engagement on social media as being crucially important to the future of their business, which is why it may come as a surprise that the overall amount of content that these companies are posting is going down. When you consider it in the following light, however, things begin to make sense.

Insurance companies are posting less frequently than they used to because they’ve finally come to understand that quality trumps quantity when it comes to social media engagement. Users simply don’t want to be bombarded with twenty posts about buying insurance for the first time, but rather would like to be exposed to one or two witty posts which draw a chuckle and pique their interests thanks to the immense effort that went into their production. You may see fewer posts promoting event insurance and other policy plans, but those you do see will by and large be of a higher quality than ever before.

Video Content Keeps Getting More Popular

While the overall amount of insurance-industry-posts has been declining recently, the number of videos being posted to popular platforms like Facebook has been swelling in recent years. This is likely because younger consumers respond more positively to video ads, which are generally more expensive to produce and thus of a higher quality than text-based visual ads, which are effectively a dime a dozen in this day and age.

There’s been a year-on-year increase in videos for some time now, though this trend may change in the future if users grow sick of autoplaying video ads which bombard them with noisy sound.

Companies Are Responding to Angrier Customers Faster

There’s no greater nightmare for an insurance company than having a host of customers complaining about shoddy service on their popular social media pages. This is why providers rush to respond to customers who voice complaints on Twitter and Facebook, despite the fact that it’s costly to do so; the more quickly you respond to angry customers, the more soothed they are, and the better your brand appears in the public eye.

Given that users now expect brands to respond quickly, you can expect this trend to keep growing with time. After all, insurance companies which fail to realize that social media platforms are excellent ways to turn angry customers into happy ones are going to run out of business sooner rather than later.

Don’t take this as a sign that customers want rushed, shoddy service, however; insurance providers must toe a fine line between responding quickly and having thorough responses that actually answer consumer questions. If you rush to answer so quickly that you fail to adequately respond to their grievances, you could just make matters worse. As time goes on, more insurance providers will likely master these trends in an effort to remain competitive in what’s becoming an increasingly cutthroat industry.