Platforms engineered to make you angry, envious or unable to stop scrolling are, it turns out, not ideal places to get financial advice.

And yet here we are.

I’ve spent nearly two decades working around this problem, from the early days of social through my time as Head of Digital Comms at a global bank, to a decade advising fintech, insurance, legal and other regulated sectors.

The pattern is remarkably consistent. Organisations want to be on social media. They believe they should be there. Someone senior has noticed a competitor doing suspiciously well on LinkedIn. A strategy is commissioned. A content calendar appears. Somebody says we need to “humanise the brand”.

And then everyone discovers that the platforms reward almost exactly the opposite of what the organisation is built to do.

This isn’t really a content problem. It’s a structural mismatch between the communication social platforms reward and the communication risk-averse organisations actually need to do.

And no amount of making the logo bigger will fix it.

The incentives are almost perfectly backwards

Social platforms reward certainty, novelty, outrage and aspiration. They like strong opinions, simple answers and people who became financially independent at 23 through a combination of waking up at 4.30am, owning seven Airbnbs and selling a course explaining how you can too.

Nuance has a tougher time.

Good financial communication is slow, qualified and probabilistic. It contains sentences like “this depends on your circumstances” and “the value of your investment may go down as well as up”. Nobody has ever screenshotted a risk disclaimer and captioned it THIS 👏.

The same tension exists across regulated sectors. Insurance has edge cases. Law has liability. Pharma has uncertainty and adverse effects. Financial products contain actual financial risk. These aren’t unfortunate communication wrinkles awaiting a sufficiently talented copywriter. They are the nature of the thing being communicated.

The platform says: make it fast, certain and shareable.

The sector says: it’s complicated, and we’re legally required to explain several ways this might go wrong.

Then someone in Marketing asks if we could make it a carousel.

The organisation isn’t built for this either

There is a second mismatch, and this one happens inside the building.

LinkedIn rewards what we like to call authenticity, although what it really rewards is a very particular performance of authenticity: personal, frequent, opinionated, immediate and just controversial enough to generate comments without requiring a meeting with HR.

Risk-averse organisations are not built like this.

They’re built around governance, approval, consistency and the management of reputational risk. This can be maddening if you’re waiting three days for someone to approve a post saying you’re delighted to be attending a conference. But these things aren’t necessarily organisational pathologies. A bank should care more about whether something is true than whether it is trending.

Put that organisation onto a platform demanding speed, personality and opinion and one of two things generally happens.

Either it moves at organisational speed and nobody sees it.

Or it learns to imitate the people who are getting attention.

Thus we arrive at one of the stranger artefacts of modern corporate life: the professionally produced spontaneous thought.

The CEO selfie accompanied by a surprisingly well-structured personal reflection. The employee story which has passed through six pairs of hands and somehow acquired three brand messages. The executive who independently decides, at exactly 8.07am on Tuesday, to share precisely the same campaign hashtag as 46 colleagues.

The more carefully authenticity is manufactured, the less authentic it becomes.

Now make the employees do it

This is where employee advocacy enters the chat.

The logic is seductive. Corporate accounts don’t travel very far. People trust people more than logos. Employees have networks. Employees are authentic! Excellent! Let’s get the employees posting!

And this is roughly where a perfectly sensible observation about how trust works turns into a programme with a toolkit, a webinar, some Canva templates and an Excel sheet tracking who has posted this month.

Because organisations tend to want the benefits of employee voice without the awkward bit where the employee has to have a voice.

Thought leadership only works if somebody has a thought. Advocacy only means anything if people have some agency over what they advocate for.

Give 400 employees the same approved copy and branded graphic and you haven’t created 400 advocates. You’ve created one corporate account with 400 passwords and family photographs. And trust me, audiences can tell the difference.

The people who are genuinely good at this aren’t good because they attended a 45-minute personal branding webinar. They’re good because they know something. They have opinions. They have experience. They can connect what they know to what other people care about.

And, crucially, they feel sufficiently trusted by their organisation to say something that hasn’t first been passed around a Teams chat called FINAL_SOCIAL_COPY_v7.

That makes employee advocacy much less of an external communications problem than it first appears.

There isn’t really an inside and an outside any more

Once upon a time, internal and external communications could at least pretend to be separate.

Employees were over here. Customers and the public were over there. Internal Comms had an intranet; External Comms had journalists; Marketing had campaigns. Everyone had their own mailing list and, with luck, their own budget.

Social media has made that distinction largely fictional. An employee can read an announcement on the intranet at 9am, discuss it on Teams at 9.15, and post their interpretation of it on LinkedIn before lunch.

Meanwhile, the CEO’s supposedly personal LinkedIn post may have been drafted by Corporate Affairs, polished by an agency, checked by Legal and then read by more employees than the CEO’s actual internal communication.

The inside is outside. The outside comes straight back in.

Which creates a fairly obvious problem if the story you’re telling externally bears little resemblance to what people are experiencing internally.

You can spend a fortune telling the world you’re a wonderful employer. Your employees are also on LinkedIn.

Also, they have met you.

This is why I think we need to stop treating employee advocacy as essentially a distribution strategy. Its success depends on what happens long before anybody opens LinkedIn.

Do people understand what the organisation is doing and why? Do they know where their work fits? Do they trust what they’re being told? Do they have access to useful information? Do leaders trust them to exercise judgement?

If not, another advocacy toolkit is unlikely to be the breakthrough.

You can’t manufacture externally what doesn’t exist internally. Employee advocacy isn’t really a social media strategy, it’s an organisational trust strategy with a social media output.

Perhaps being bad at social is useful information

We tend to treat poor performance on social media as a problem requiring intervention.

Perhaps it is information.

If your organisation struggles to communicate effectively on a platform, that tells you something about the organisation, the platform or, usually, both.

But because we’ve spent the past 15 years treating social media presence as more or less axiomatic, we rarely ask the obvious question.

Why are we doing this?

Instead we ask how to improve the strategy.

We need a LinkedIn strategy.

We need an employee advocacy programme.

We need more video.

We need our leaders posting.

We need thought leadership.

But y tho?

Nobody wakes up wanting their bank to have better LinkedIn engagement. They want to know whether they can afford the mortgage.

So: FFS start there.

The boring stuff is often boring because it works

For some communication, the answer is deeply unfashionable.

A clear piece of long-form guidance on a channel you control can be read, revisited, checked and shared. Email remains remarkably effective at putting information in front of a known group of people. Documentation lets complexity exist without being squeezed into six slides with enormous numbers on them. An intranet can provide context, provenance and somewhere to find the bloody thing again next Tuesday.

None of this will make anyone at a marketing conference gasp, but that is not a serious argument against it.

Then there are people. Financial advisers, branch staff, lawyers, medical teams, managers, subject-matter experts: people who can explain the awkward bit, answer the follow-up question and understand why the answer for one person might not be the answer for another.

Some of those people will also be your best external communicators. Not because you’ve successfully transformed them into Brand Ambassadors™. But because expertise travels.

Someone who is useful, knowledgeable and trusted inside an organisation has a decent chance of being useful, knowledgeable and trusted outside it too.

Good thought leadership is often simply organisational knowledge with a name and a face attached to it. Comms doesn’t need to manufacture the thought. It needs to help the person who had it get it out of the building without sanding off everything interesting on the way.

Governance is critical, too. I know “governance is good, actually” is unlikely to get me booked for many tech conferences, but approval processes aren’t inherently communication failures. Sometimes they’re how organisations make sure what they say is accurate, lawful and trustworthy.

The answer isn’t zero governance. It’s governance proportionate to the risk, and quick enough that the information remains useful by the time it escapes.

Why do we keep doing this, then?

Because social media is wonderfully visible.

Followers! Impressions! Engagement!

A graph goes up and everybody gets to feel something happened.

“We posted 37 times this quarter and reached 1.2 million people” sounds reassuringly like achievement.

“We made our guidance considerably easier to understand” is harder to put on a dashboard.

This is one reason organisations repeatedly over-invest in things they can easily count. Social media provides abundant evidence that communication was distributed. It provides rather less evidence that communication did anything useful.

There is FOMO too, obviously.

Our competitors are there. Our customers are there. Our employees are there. The CEO is there and has started asking why a man he went to business school with gets more likes.

But “people are there” isn’t the same as “this is where this communication should happen”.

People are also in pubs. Most banks have resisted developing a pub strategy.

And social media isn’t really social media any more

There is another reason to revisit all this: the thing we’re calling social media isn’t really the thing organisations originally signed up for.

The promise was connection. Conversation. Communities. Organisations could talk directly to customers and employees; people could talk back; useful things might happen in public.

What we increasingly have instead is an advertising system wrapped around a feed.

Algorithms decide what gets seen. Organic reach has been squeezed. Platforms have become exceptionally sophisticated at identifying which bits of human behaviour will hold attention for long enough to put another advert beside them.

Advertising is useful.

Distribution is useful.

Discoverability is useful.

But advertising isn’t conversation, and attention-capture isn’t connection. We should stop pretending we’re still buying the thing in the 2012 brochure.

This matters particularly in regulated and high-trust sectors because social media doesn’t simply distribute their communications: it fundamentally changes them.

It encourages organisations to be more certain, more immediate, more personal and more provocative because those are the behaviours the system rewards. Then it provides a lovely dashboard showing how well the more provocative version performed.

The metric becomes the brief, and somewhere along the way, “is this useful?” becomes “did it engage?”

Use social where it earns its place

None of this means regulated organisations should delete LinkedIn, retreat behind the compliance manual and communicate exclusively through 47-page PDFs.

Social media can be extremely useful.

It can be good for discovery, recruitment, campaigning, customer service and professional reputation. It can help expertise travel beyond organisational boundaries. It can connect people who genuinely have something useful to say with people who genuinely want to hear it.

Those are jobs. “Being on social” isn’t one.

So start with your actual communication system. Where do people go when they need information they trust? Who do they ask? Which channels work for which tasks? Where does information get stuck? Where does it get distorted? What happens when something moves from internal to external and back again?

Then make those things work brilliantly.

And if you want employees to participate externally, don’t confuse enabling people to communicate with turning people into channels.

The former means giving people context, confidence, permission and access to good information, then trusting them to exercise judgement.

The latter means emailing everyone some suggested LinkedIn copy at 10am and wondering why 47 people are simultaneously “thrilled to share” the same news by lunchtime.

The channel should fit the job

For years we’ve treated social media presence as almost axiomatic. Of course an organisation should be there. The only questions were which platforms, how often and who gets the password.

I think that assumption deserves another look.

Not because social media is universally bad. Not because regulated organisations are uniquely incapable of being interesting. And not because everything was better when corporate communications involved a fax machine and a man called Nigel.

But because channels have characteristics. Organisations have characteristics. Communication tasks have characteristics.

Good communication happens when those things fit.

And the boundaries have changed. Employees are simultaneously audience, expert, commentator and public voice. What happens inside the organisation shapes what can credibly be said outside it. The external story comes straight back into the building to be judged by people who know whether it’s true.

Which means the answer isn’t simply to get better at feeding the platforms.

Sometimes the strategic decision is to stop trying to win a game whose rules require you to become worse at the thing people trust you to do.

Use social media where it earns its place. Trust knowledgeable people to have actual thoughts. Build the communication infrastructure that gives them something worth saying.

And stop assuming every communication problem needs to be solved in the feed.

This piece was prompted by commentary I contributed to Finextra’s “How Social Media Became a Fintech Antihero,” published in September 2026. The mismatch between social platforms and regulated sectors is one I’ve been working around for nearly two decades