The INSURTECH Book

Social Media in Insurance

By Erik Abrahamsson

Founder and CEO, Digital Fineprint (DFP)

Social media has earned a place in the life of almost every single person on the planet. There are now 1.97 billion active Facebook users as of April 2017.¹ As of June 2017, the world population was 7.5 billion, meaning a quarter of the world’s population is on social media.² Because of this, one would have expected insurers to start using this omnipresent technology much faster than is currently the case. But using social media for insurance is hard, and expert guidance is needed when navigating the technical, legal, and ethical landscape of social media analytics. In this chapter, I will explain some of the main challenges, and propose ways for how we as an industry can solve them. There will also be examples of insurers getting it right, and wrong, and two alternative scenarios for the future of insurance. Ready? Let’s get into it.

We can start by agreeing on the fact that social media is ubiquitous in almost all other industries. We use Facebook to login to our Spotify accounts and get music recommendations. We order flowers and groceries directly from our WhatsApp or WeChat accounts. And even banks have woken up to the massive opportunities inherent in analysing social media data, and use it for marketing and for helping users to a smoother customer journey. The birth of FinTech in the late 2000s has accelerated the development of social into financial services, and we are now starting ...