So what’s social media got to do with the intermediated general insurance market? It’s a comment we often hear from the denizens of Leadenhall Street and EC3. So to prove a point, we’ve conducted our own piece of research examining how insurance professionals are using LinkedIn.com, the the world’s leading business networking website.

LinkedIn has over 50 million professional worldwide, who use the site for career development, networking and information sharing.  A LinkedIn group is a closed group to which you apply for membership once you’ve joined LinkedIn itself. Once in a group, you can join discussions, receive messages and see information that your fellow members have posted.

Having trawled the site, we’ve produced this list of groups, ranked by membership, in which insurance and/or risk is the principal subject. To this end, we haven’t listed general financial services groups which cover a range of disciplines such as banking, FX as well as insurance. We’ve also ignored groups which are blatantly about headhunting and recruitment.

Our listing covers 64 groups, comprising a total of 116,200 members. As you’ll see, some are networking groups based around a particular subject; some are corporate or alumni groups for a particular business, and there are others like Post magazine’s own group coming in at number 55 on our list. These groups are all active so insurance professionals are logged onto them now discussing subjects and swapping information. The question for any insurance business is: how do you know what’s they’re saying? And, indeed, more importantly: are they talking about you?

That’s why, even in a close-knit B2B market like general insurance, social media is growing in significance and increasingly needs to be taken into account when planning and implementing communication strategies.Retail and B2C companies are well aware of the power of social media as are a growing number of direct insurers and motor insurers, who find their claims handling being discussed in online car and motorcycle forums. Indeed, we recently handled a media enquiry from a journalist who’d heard about a particularly badly handled claim via  an online forum he was a member of.

So if you want to communicate with the insurance community and hear what it says in return, LinkedIn should be forming part of your comms strategy.

Written by Adrian Beeby

Tags: FWD, Insurance, Linkedin, LinkedIn groups, most popular

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 4:12 pm and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.