Insurers' Social Media Sites Examined

While the insurance industry’s presence in social media is well-established and pervasive, three insurers stood out on the most popular platform, Facebook, in Corporate Insight’s latest report: State Farm Nation, Flo the Progressive Girl and Allstate Mayhem.

The report, “Social Media Leaders,” found that ninety-two percent of annuity and insurance providers being tracked by the firm use social media of some form or another. While among financial institutions overall, Twitter has surpassed Facebook in terms of the number of firms with a presence and the number of pages per firm, Facebook remains the most popular among insurers.

Five P&C companies—Allstate, GEICO, Nationwide, Progressive and State Farm—offer four or more pages on the social media site while the industry average is two pages per firm. Indeed, more specific insurance industry averages on Facebook are driven by those top three pages from State Farm, Progressive and Allstate.

Average fans per page drops from 140,000 to 35,000 when you remove those three pages, and when you remove the latter two from interactive categories, the industry averages a mere 18.3 links, 4.7 comments and 3.5 shares per post. Meanwhile, Flo averages 1,100 comments per post and Mayhem’s posts an average 1,300 shares and 9,000 likes per post.

The report noted that across financial institutions, success is found when firms provide information that the viewing audience wants, rather than strictly relaying the information your firm wants to share. Other recommendations were to integrate social tools into website design and to segment campaigns to target specific clients.

Many firms control more than one feed on Twitter as well, using multiple channels on both sites to help segment the audiences’ needs by offering feeds specifically for recruitment, corporate mascots, promoting certain lines of business, advisor-related materials and philanthropic work. On Twitter, GEICO, Progressive, Sun Life and Travelers are also testing customer service-specific feeds.

Thirty-eight percent of firms found actively participating in social media offer blogs as well. The two highest-rated blogs in the report, the Allstate Blog and Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project Blog, were noted for their wide range of topics.

Proprietary communities are far less popular still, as only Allstate and TIAA-CREF host communities. The report noted TIAA’s impressive aim at baby boomers with its hands-off approach at myretirement.org.