Through social media, Gates’ team communicates daily with people who, through their employers (“plan sponsors,” to the plan provider), are members of MassMutual’s Retirement Services family.

“As the Gen-Y’s and Millenniums and whoever after that come into the work force, their expectation is going to be that we provide them a medium to communicate with us the way they prefer to – not the way we prefer them to,” Gates said. “I tell our group all the time: If you don’t provide them the avenue to conduct business with you that they prefer, they’ll go to somebody else.

“We can’t just rely on the website, or printed statements. It has to be across all mediums – because everyone’s different in the way they want to interact.”

A fundamental caution when participating in the world of social media is not to harbor unrealistic expectations – but also not to underestimate the potential to deliver highly desirable and extremely valuable information.

“Social media is not the forum from which to push your product,” said Gates. “It’s more of a ‘service’ – people will follow you, and engage with you, if they think they’re getting valuable information out of it.

“And this goes into our overarching communication strategy: We think there are two types of employees working for our plan sponsors. There are the employees who need some convincing that their retirement plan is where they should invest their money for a better chance at retirement success.

“Then there’s a growing population – especially in the younger-age market – who know they should be saving, but their issue is that they cannot, because they don’t have enough income, or they have expenses that are too high.”

All these circumstances provide further grist as to precisely what information – and in what format – people will most appreciate receiving through social media.

“You can find a lot of experts in social media,” said Gates. “But social media as it pertains to an employee benefit or, in this case, a retirement plan, there’s really not a body of work there. In fact, as near as I can tell, we are one of just two companies that have a social-media page specific to retirement products. Everyone else just has an enterprise-level page where they do all their products.

“We decided to put our toe in the water, and build up some knowledge and learnings along the way as we refine and get better – and eventually have a better social-media product than everyone else’s, because we got in earlier.”

Again, there’s a developing realization that, in particular, younger people are choosing very strongly to communicate on their own terms.They want to use communication tools of their choice, and they want information delivered in specific ways.

“Two things we’ve learned while talking to people about education in their finances,” Gates said. “One is that they would rather hear from someone their own age, rather than – in the case of younger employees – someone who is much older kind of coming off as a parental lecture.

“And the second is that when given the opportunity to go to someone for help, almost all the time these folks pick an independent third party – a friend, a family member, their coworker – because it’s obviously not true, but there’s the sentiment that MassMutual, or any investment manager or provider, has an ‘agenda.’ And are we a credible source for help?

“So for that reason, we’re using industry experts in our social media to tell the same story.”

The result is an evolving social-media strategy, and continually accumulating knowledge tweaks the ongoing effort.

“It’s very important that we know who we are,” Gates said. “We’re a retirement provider who’s offering a service for people who are interested in saving for retirement.

“And although I think that’s important to 100 percent of the people in the country, it may not be interesting to 100 percent. So we don’t expect to get millions of people following us. But those who do, we expect to be interested and engaged with the tips they might find – or some of the ideas, or educational things we offer.”