Last week Klaxos led a discussion at the Mortgage Bankers Association annual meeting on how finance professionals can leverage LinkedIn to create incremental business development opportunities and expand recognition of their employer’s brand. Most mortgage and loan salespeople only have their employment title on LinkedIn. They do not realize that people are increasingly searching for local professional services, such as mortgages and loans on LinkedIn, comparable to Yelp and the Yellow Pages. They are also not aware that Wikipedia and LinkedIn profiles are frequently at the top of search engine results. With 500+ million members, you cannot afford to have a “nonperforming” LinkedIn profile. Social selling is using professional social media to add value by posting thoughtful content and answering prospect questions until they are ready to purchase.
Klaxos at the Mortgage Bankers Association
Mortgage bankers can increase sales leads with an optimized profile that includes keywords, accomplishments, professional photo, videos, website links, email, phone number and a call to action. It is a better value and more impactful than spending thousands for online advertising or website SEO. See a mortgage banker sample LinkedIn profile. Adding pertinent hard skill words to your profile is the first and most impactful step towards increasing visibility. The image below shows “mortgage” related skills preloaded into LinkedIn. All you need to do is add them to your profile.
The screenshot below displays skills correlated to “loan” currently within LinkedIn. Just “add” them to your profile to increase your visibility.
After your profile is enhanced, you can enroll in LinkedIn’s free ProFinder service to receive requests for quotes from people seeking all types of professional services, including residential and commercial leasing, sales and law. We hear from many organizations generating significant revenue from ProFinder.
Be sure to abide by the compliance and social media policies of your company and regulatory organizations. Do conform to government regulations and social media policies of your organization, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and other agencies. A good resource is this Social Media Compliance for Mortgage Lenders presentation and the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule.
NMLS numbers, disclosures and explanations need to be CLEAR AND CONSPICUOUS. The FTC updated its Endorsement Guide in 2017. Traditional RESPA issues still apply. RESPA requires lenders and others involved in mortgage lending to provide borrowers with pertinent and timely disclosures regarding the nature and costs of a real estate settlement process.
One regulation is that no person shall give or accept any “thing of value” pursuant to any agreement or understanding that business shall be referred to any person. Some clients have asked us whether clicking on the “endorse” button for a skill button at the bottom on Linkedin profiles is defined as a “thing of value”. There is no prohibition against that kind of endorsement where there is no material connection between the parties and the endorsement is no attached to any expectation of referrals.
Klaxos has been retained by sales managers at organizations such as Bloomberg, Gartner, Visa, Fuji Film, Keller Williams Realty, nonprofits and trade associations to transform their LinkedIn profile from a business card to a lead generating webpage. Organizations hire us to write and install profiles for all the external facing staff, thus creating a consistent, dominant social selling presence with LinkedIn’s 500 million members. We have also worked with thousands of individual clients. You can view financial services client profile examples on our website.
The team at Klaxos provided LinkedIn profile reviews and advice to the hundreds of professionals that visited our trade conference display. We and mortgage professionals were galvanized by the discussion of ideas and occasions for use digital professional networking to grow their client list.
