SmartBlogs on Social Media

At Farmers Insurance, agents are seen as its competitive advantage. Agents get know policyholders, create relationships with them and are there in times of need.

Farmers’ Ryon Harms was tasked with helping this army of agents extend these real-world relationships to Facebook. The result was a detailed training program that helped agents understand the fundamentals of Facebook, taught them how to create genuine engagement and showed them how to work the tool into their already-busy day.

At our recent BlogWell in San Francisco, Harms walked us through exactly how Farmers did it. A few of his big ideas:

• Teach them how to fish. Philosophically, Farmers decided early on that it would focus on teaching agents how to use social media, rather than do it for them at the corporate level. One of the biggest reasons? Analytics showed that individual agents at the local level were seeing significantly higher engagement than what Farmers could possibly do at the corporate level.
• Find the bright spots. When Harms first launched Facebook training for agents, he used examples of success from agents who were already using the platform successfully. With real examples of real agents, he was able to demonstrate how much potential Facebook offered to everybody else.
• Help them use Facebook to tell people who they are, not what they sell. This was a key technique that Farmers’ most successful agents used. They understood that Facebook is a place to build relationships and demonstrate personality — much like they naturally do when engaging with customers in their office or over the phone.

Watch the case study. Slides are available.