Our first Firstrade post came back with a question: could it go to their compliance officer too?

When we started on March 25, 2019, Firstrade's Facebook page had 61,849 likes and, in our audit's words, "very little engagement". Twitter had 189 followers. YouTube had 1,250 views. "There is an instagram account," the audit noted, "but it is currently empty."

The words our brand audit used for Firstrade were knowledge, professionalism, respect, polished and seriousness. The people its marketing team wanted to reach were 23 to 35 and just starting to invest, and the team wanted Firstrade to be the broker that grew up with them. A new app was weeks from launch.

The scope we started with was twelve Facebook posts and twelve Instagram posts a month, ten Instagram stories a month, twenty to twenty-five tweets a week, four short videos a month, outbound engagement and a weekly report.

At Firstrade, anything sensitive had to clear the compliance officer, so the program had to be built for that reader before it was built for the feed.

Firstrade's own team. Before the first post, Firstrade told us it handled engagement in-house and didn't want to hand that part over, so we agreed that every comment and message that came to Firstrade's pages stayed with Firstrade. We handled only the conversations we started.

Our March 2019 strategy put one rule in capitals: "DO NOT engage people looking for financial advice." It also said we would ask before regramming anyone's post.

Our community work was outbound: following, liking and commenting on public posts under investing hashtags and among the followers of finance publishers. The December 2019 scope gave it five hours a week. The March 2020 plan came with sample comments written in advance, such as "Investing can be simple.", and a stay-away list that started with politics and religion.

In October 2019 Firstrade told us new options messaging was coming as part of a general brand change, away from a blanket "free" line. By December our fee graphics named each fee separately: commissions, contract fees, and exercise and assignment fees.

Formats had rules too. GIFs came with a note to be safe and to look first at how other brands used them. Memes were paused, then came back, not too often. The notes went down to capital letters: on the Refer a Friend stills, "Get a Free Stock" was not to run in all caps.

And Firstrade asked us to drop the jargon. "Consolidated dashboard portfolio" was the product's own name; the posts were to say what it meant to a regular person. The tone Firstrade settled on was grounded, with room to be cheeky.