Social media, and particularly TikTok, is a great tool to engage Gen Z (young people born between 1997 and 2012) but providers need to be careful that posts about protection do not fall foul of the regulator.
This was one of the key conclusions of a panel debate during Protection Review’s latest Protect Z conference in London yesterday.
Kicking off the event, journalist Clodagh Griffin’s keynote address revealed Gen Z prefers to use TikTok over Google as their search engine.
And in the subsequent panel debate, Juliette Meads, national account manager at Vitality, revealed the insurer has launched on TikTok over the past couple of weeks to better engage with Gen Z audiences.
Meads added the insurer’s posts have been designed to engage audiences quickly and explain insurance in layman’s terms, with the posts going down well with the provider’s following.
But elaborating on social media strategy further, Meads maintained it was important to run posts about product by compliance teams for sign-off so as to ensure customers do not complain to the ombudsman about claims made in any such post.
And Meads pointed to the example of a post she had prepared at a previous employer.
“I posted at my previous company on Valentine’s Day ‘Do you know that we can cover a broken heart?’ and I got pulled into marketing who said, ‘You’ve got to be careful because if someone has a heart attack, we can’t cover it and they can use that,'” Meads said.
“That felt a bit dramatic to me. I thought that was quite a good post. So you do just have to be careful.”
‘Message risks getting diluted’
Britney Trussler, senior protection consultant at Dynamo, agreed adding: “I post on my LinkedIn. There’s not a formal sign off process but obviously we do need to be mindful that what we’re putting out there isn’t an endorsement in a certain way or coming across a certain way.
“And I think by having a level of sign off it does give a wider perspective and highlight things that maybe you wouldn’t have thought that could be interpreted a different way.”
But Lucia Jarvis, senior marketing executive at National Friendly, said a balance needs to be struck to ensure messaging is not diluted.
“It’s a little bit tricky,” Jarvis said. “We’re a provider so we do need to run things past compliance.
“It’s that thing that you mention that you’ve got different opinions so something may be interesting but by the time it’s gone through compliance and several different people, the message might get a little bit diluted so I think it’s very tricky place that we have to work around.
“TikTok and Instagram are such fast moving platforms so I guess there has to be a change in processes.”