Career Path for Journalism Majors – Insurance?

Social Media is a collection of inter-connected people networks – create interest at any point in the network and content can spread. People have become comfortable with sharing; Facebook and Twitter have made it very easy. As an illustration, The Wall Street Journal benefits from 2.5 million Facebook referrals every month – people regard sharing as helpful.
While insurers are unlikely to benefit from broad distribution, each new person reached comes with the added benefit of receiving information from a trusted friend, an implicit referral.
Content sharing as an objective imposes new rules for insurers. White papers and other lengthy tomes are out; short, sharp, “snack-size” pieces are in. Writers need to get to the point, address the perceived problem, and make it interesting.
Video works especially well. Consumers like to watch and share video but time constraints are strict. The rule of thumb is the average music track on iTunes – 3 ½ minutes. Allianz Life, American Family, USAA, Mass Mutual have all recently produced short-form video recently, in part to inform, in part to have shared.
In our own analysis of over 150 insurance Facebook pages, short punchy informative information is the most likely to be shared. Insurers are not great however creating this type of content. Insurers tend to be verbose and the final review by legal does little to help. We ran the “Flesch Reading Ease Readability” test on 100 pages for 15 insurer websites, 14 were judged to be “Fairly Difficult” or “Difficult” with one assessed as Confusing. Insurers will need to recruit more English and journalism majors to be able to exploit social media, people rarely attracted to the industry.