Financial Advisors on TikTok: Can It Work?

If you’ve kept up in the world of social media, you’ve likely heard a lot of talk about TikTok, both good and bad. With TikTok as one of the fastest-growing social media sites, financial advisors might be tempted to use it to garner brand recognition and potentially generate leads for your financial advisory. 

Today we will dive into the data available on TikTok’s users to give you a sense of how viable it could be for your advisory firm. With TikTok as the No. 4 social media site based on active users, behind Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, it would be easy to think that TikTok is the obvious next platform to start marketing on. There are major TikTok marketing success stories out there, too, given how advertisements can be displayed and targeted in a user-tailored form. However, the demographics of the audience is the key to unlocking if TikTok can drive marketing success for your business. 

When you look at the age demographics, you will find that only 11% of TikTok users are over the age of 50 and only 4.1% are over 55. For clarity, 69% of TikTok users are under the age of 40 and 47% are under the age of 29. In comparison 11% of Facebook users are over 65, 22% are over 55 and 36% are over the age of 45. Demographically speaking, Facebook better fits the profile of the type of person that advisors typically look for in a new client. 

To be fair, TikTok does post strong engagement, retention and conversion numbers on average. Active users on TikTok will spend an average of 95 minutes per day on the site. Regarding the demographic of income, TikTok has a large range of users but approximately 37% of users have an income greater than $100,000. 

The other item you must take into consideration when deciding if you want to utilize TikTok is the time commitment it will take to create relevant content that will connect with your demographic and help you gain followers and reach. TikTok is a site that demands consistent, fresh content to remain relevant. That means not only posting several times a week if not daily but commenting and engaging with fans and followers. Outside of just doing paid advertising, the organic side of generating leads via this platform could be a major time commitment.  

Looking at all this data, along with the time commitment needed, a case could be made that if you have a national audience to connect to, it could be worth the investment to utilize this platform. Also, if you look to connect to a younger demographic for future leads or to capture potential referrers, the platform may be worth exploring. 

When it comes to the typical local audience that most advisors are looking for, with the commitment needed both monetarily and from a creation standpoint, TikTok may not be the best use of your resources. Potentially in the future, TikTok will be the place to be for advisors, but today it’s less likely to give you the return on investment you might think. 

As we like to say, the data can help tell the story. 

Craig Foster is Lone Beacon’s Director of Digital Media.