Archive for November, 2009

Financial Advisors Expect Social Networking To Have Impact On Business

Nov 30th

Posted by Pat Allen in Uncategorized

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Sixty percent of financial advisors who participated in today’s RidgeWorth Investments’ Webinar believe that social networking will grow in importance over the next year or two. One out of five said it already plays or will play a significant role in their 2010 marketing efforts–while one out of five have their doubts that it’s going to affect business in the near future.

Presenter Kip Gregory of The Gregory Group said the online poll results were consistent with a recent larger survey he conducted of 1,000 advisors.

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Acknowledging the FINRA guidelines that pertain to social network participation (see slide from the presentation above), Gregory focused most of his talk on the networking potential and “intelligence-gathering capability” of LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is beyond the scope of what we’re working on here at AdvisorTweets (reminds me of the time I asked for help with my radiator at JustTires).

But, we recommend the Webinar to you. A replay will be available starting tomorrow at www.ridgeworth.com/social-networking or you could request an email summary from www.winningclients.com/ridgeworth09webinar.php

Thank You, Advisors

Nov 25th

Posted by Pat Allen in Random

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For as long as we’ve been interacting with financial advisors, we’ve been struck by a quality that we suspect they themselves take for granted: They’re people people. They like to mix, they’re genuinely interested in what motivates others and they’ve found a way to draw on those qualities for their livelihood.

AdvisorTweets.com is a showcase for advisors’ skill at connecting. We’re seeing advisors connect with one another and with Twitter accounts belonging to the media, a few asset managers, other corporate entities, friends, contacts, the charities they support, etc.

More to the point, a steady monitoring of the Twitter stream provides a measure of who someone is. We get a sense of each Twitter-using advisor through their interactions, their content selections and even their word choices.

On this day before Thanksgiving, we just want to say thank you.

The best financial advisors are pillars of their community, and now the online community has expectations of advisors who are included in the AdvisorTweets universe and profiled on other sites. Thank you, advisors, for living up to our expectations when we developed this site.

Thanksgiving is a traditional holiday for celebrating community and giving thanks. When I join my family and relatives around the physical table tomorrow, I want you to know that I’ll be giving thanks for this community, too.

Enjoy your feast. We look forward to following your wit and wisdom when you get back to business.

Tweets Close To Home: The Value Of The Financial Advisor

Nov 19th

Posted by Pat Allen in Roundup

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The value of the financial advisor, the meaning of fiduciary and the means by which financial advisors are compensated are recurring subjects of tweets included in the AdvisorTweets stream. Here’s just a sampling of the latest.

  • @RussThornton Must read > @AdvisorPerspectives Letter to Editor response to fee/value justification for planning with passive portfolios http://ow.ly/DHWV
  • @jdbuerger Value, Advice and Your Wealth Health – Read My Latest Blog Post at http://bit.ly/altusFB
  • @RussellDunkin Great post by @sbanjo on the fuss over fiduciary. Confused? Take 60 seconds to learn more: http://bit.ly/1nsffy
  • @ScottDCole If dealing with a “fee based” advisor, ask why you should pay both a commission and a fee. “Fee only” means NO commissions.
  • @rwohlner True value of a financial advisor is providing unbiased 3rd party view of a client’s situation with actionable suggestions. #in

Remember that you can use the Search engine to find tweets on specific keywords.

WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg Lead Financial Advisors’ Content Picks (Sept.-Nov.)

Nov 12th

Posted by Pat Allen in AdvisorTweets Support

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What are financial advisors thinking? That’s the AdvisorTweets’ tagline, but “What are financial advisors reading?” might have been apropos.

Most advisor tweets include links to other Web pages. On AdvisorTweets’ Links page we present the links that advisors tweet about as well as the number of instances over a few time periods (today, the last 24 hours, the last week and earlier).

But having bought and sold media at various turns, we’ve been eager to analyze the sources of the content that advisors are linking to. What Web sites do advisors rely on and recommend? Back in the day, all we had was readership surveys; now we have data on the actual behavior of this group of largely independent financial advisors.

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To produce the graph shown above, we started with 6,000-plus tweets that contained links since the site was launched two months ago. First we backed out links that advisors sent to their own Web sites and blogs. Then we excluded a few sites that were linked to by only one advisor. Their strong support of these sites (local newspapers’, for example) would have misrepresented the community.

The top site linked to overall–the focus of 1,268 tweets–was Google News, an aggregator. Yahoo News? Just 26 tweets.

Facebook was the source of 282 tweets, but many of those were links to advisors’ comments on their own pages. A total of 116 tweets included links to YouTube videos, including a few advisors’ videos. Twitpic was the top image-sharing site, with 77 tweets.

Tweets featuring content on asset management sites were scarce. Only American Century Investments, Navellier, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Vanguard, Pimco and Fidelity domains were cited.

While we’d caution against drawing any sweeping conclusions based on two months of data, we’re intrigued by whatever influences financial advisors. The financial advisors who make up the AdvisorTweets universe are themselves influencing others via their tweets. More to come.

AdvisorTweets’ Twitter Lists Available

Nov 5th

Posted by Pat Allen in AdvisorTweets Support

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Of course, we’re making the AdvisorTweets universe available in a Twitter list!

We see no conflict in creating the Twitter list while continuing to offer the richer experience (i.e., the aggregation which produces trending themes, tags, shared links, search and history) of AdvisorTweets.com. The more ways to follow advisors’ tweets the better.

In fact, we’ve created two other lists that are subsets of AdvisorTweets—one of certified financial planners (CFPs) and the other of registered investment advisers (RIAs).

If you’re a financial advisor on AdvisorTweets and belong on one of these lists, please be sure to check them, and send us a Twitter direct message if an adjustment is necessary.

Our continuous search for Twitter-using financial advisors leads us to make a few suggestions about enhancing the information value and searchability of Twitter bios. Even when a bio fails us and we need to explore an advisor’s Web site, credentials are not always front and center. For the CFP/RIA lists, we’ve erred on the side of not including an advisor when we could not be certain. Again, a message to us can quickly fix omissions.

No doubt there will be many financial advisor lists made available. Remember that AdvisorTweets follows only U.S.-based advisors and curates who we follow based on the business purposes of the tweets.

A Closer Look At Financial Advisors Who Use Twitter

Nov 3rd

Posted by Pat Allen in AdvisorTweets Support

2 comments

We’ve learned a lot in the six weeks since AdvisorTweets.com was launched–and that was the point! (See our introduction post on RockTheBoatMarketing.com.)

What follows is an analysis of the AdvisorTweets universe, insights into traffic to the site and a look at advisors’ tweeting patterns. We’ll revisit all at the end of the year.

The AdvisorTweets Universe
We launched on September 16 with 203 advisors; the universe now includes 286. We’re aware of about 80 other advisors using Twitter for personal commentary. For perspective, Dan Miller of the Discovery Database estimates that there are 380,000 financial representatives actively selling mutual funds.

Although there are some registered representatives taking part, the vast majority of advisors using Twitter are independent financial advisors, including certified financial planners (CFPs), registered investment advisers (RIAs) and Accredited Investment Fiduciary® (AIFs). Compliance reasons cited by internal Compliance officers lacking guidelines from FINRA are believed to be keeping others away from Twitter. However, FINRA has formed a task force and scheduled a Dec. 16 Webinar at which some guidance is expected. See our post and comments on the subject.

Represented are advisors from 41 states, with more than 10 advisors tweeting from the following states. (For a listing of Twitter accounts, see the By State widget in the right-hand column of the AdvisorTweets pages.)

  • California (45)
  • Texas (18)
  • Florida (17)
  • Illinois (14)
  • Georgia (13)
  • New Jersey (12)
  • Colorado (11)
  • Michigan (11)
  • New York (11)
  • Ohio (10)

States yet to be represented are:

  • Alaska
  • Hawaii
  • Mississippi
  • Montana
  • Nebraska
  • New Mexico
  • North Dakota
  • Vermont
  • Wyoming

Tweets
See AdvisorTweets’ Trending Topics, Trending Tags and Links to get a sense of what financial advisors tweet about. AdvisorTweets is a curated site, meaning that the advisor universe includes only advisors who are using their accounts for business purposes. As you’ll see below, advisors are tweeting on investment and personal finance topics throughout the workweek and weekends. However, we’ve seen that the stream can get diluted with football-related tweets Friday nights, Sundays and Monday evenings. We’re thinking that they just can’t help themselves.

As of Nov. 1, the most prolific advisors, in terms of tweets sent, are:

Financial Advisors With At Least 3,000 Followers
A Twitter account’s follower count may/may not be a reflection of the quality of tweets. Just in case it’s significant, here’s a look at the top financial advisors by follower count as of Nov. 2.

Web Analytics Insights
Visitors to AdvisorTweets spend an average 6:30 minutes on the site, viewing an average 5.2 pages.

Top 5 Viewed State Listings

Top 10 Viewed Advisor Profiles

Tweeting Patterns
Subscribing to the full AdvisorTweets RSS feed with Google Reader enables us to look at when financial advisors send tweets.

The 30-day high was 151 tweets on October 15, compared to the 30-day daily average of 129 tweets.

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Over the last 30 days, Mondays were advisors’ favorite day to tweet, followed by Sundays.

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While 7 p.m. is the peak tweeting time, automated Twitter publishing applications enable advisors to tweet all day and all night.

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Interested in learning more about the AdvisorTweets universe? Please see our re-designed Profiles page.