Behind the scenes of AdvisorTweets.com
Archive for March, 2010
Meet AdvisorTweets’ Top 5 Financial Advisors In March
Mar 31st
Given the heightened interest in financial advisors and their growing adoption of social media, we’re committed to doing a better job of mining and sharing AdvisorTweets data.
With the close of the month, we thought we’d introduce you to the top advisors (in number of tweets sent) for the month of March. Even though we’re calling the end of month at noon CDT today, @MKTWealth’s March tweet total gives it a comfortable lead that we think will stick.
More than 2,800 tweets were sent by AdvisorTweets’ top five in March. If you’re a Twitter user yourself, you know that Twitter takes work—if nothing else, let’s give our five gentlemen props for the commitment.
But for us to publish just a list of the top tweeters would have limited value. Fortunately—and this is something we repeatedly stress with our Rock The Boat Marketing consulting clients—almost every aspect of an unprotected Twitter account is observable and able to be reported on. (Remember that AdvisorTweets is a curated site that follows Twitter accounts of financial advisors who are using Twitter for business purposes. In other words, they are tweeting to be followed and read.)
So, we’re augmenting the list with some insights available from TweetStats.com and tweet clouds generated by Wordle.net via TweetStats. The clouds will give you an idea of what the scope of the accounts’ tweets.
And now, without further ado, meet the financial advisors tracked by AdvisorTweets who sent the most tweets in March 2010.
#1 @MKTWealth (954 tweets)
March’s top-tweeting account belongs to Matthew Todsen of MKT Wealth Management, a Costa Mesa, CA, investment advisory firm. After relatively low activity in its first six months on Twitter, @MKTWealth kicked up the tweeting in February, sending more than 1,000 tweets in a short month. As the tweet cloud shows, most tweets are related to market events.
A peek into Matthew’s social media strategy: As prolific as @MKTWealth is, the link in the Twitter profile goes to an invitation-only blog.
#2 @SmallBiz401k (890 tweets)
Having created the @SmallBiz401k account in May, CFA Matt Hudgins of Mosaic Wealth Management, LLC has been a steady tweeter since December. As you might expect from the account name, his tweets are retirement plan-focused.
Matt’s style is to include a shortened URL to his Web site at the start of each tweet. It overwhelmed the Wordle image so we’re showing the tweet cloud provided by TweetStats.
#3. @RWohlner (443 tweets)
Chicago-area CFP Roger Wohlner is author of a December 2009 blog post we repeatedly refer others to when they wonder why financial advisors tweet. Roger is one of the most “generous” tweeters (he ranks in the 99.78 percentile, according to Retweetrank.com), and the tweet cloud reflects that.
#4. @JesseFelder (328 tweets)
@JesseFelder is the oldest Twitter account in this group (dating back to March 2007). It belongs to Jesse Felder, founder of Bend, OR-based investment advisory firm Felder & Company. Jesse is one of AdvisorTweets’ more visual tweeters, as reflected by the prominence of charts, cartoons and pics in his tweet cloud.
#5. @PJSacchetta (238 tweets)
And representing the East Coast is Pasquale J Sacchetta of Westport, CT. President of CFIG Wealth Management, LLC, PJ is an MBA, CLU, AEP and CFP.
PJ’s tweet cloud surprised us. There’s a lot of variety in his tweets, as the cloud reflects but we follow his tweets closely and would have thought that a technology bias would have been more evident. PJ is also a generous re-tweeter (in the 99% percentile on RetweetRank.com).
Smart Money Article On ‘Brokers’ Use of Twitter Misses A Few Points
Mar 29th
Thanks to a @BillWinterberg tweet this morning, we saw the SmartMoney.com article What Brokers Can and Can’t Say On Twitter, published today.
In the response we posted, we commented on two lines:
1. “But even if those “tweets” are just 140 characters, they are turning out to be a headache to regulate.”
Here’s our comment:
“I don’t know that it’s proven that tweets are ‘turning out to be a headache to regulate.’ All investment professionals, whether regulated by FINRA or the SEC, are aware of the care that needs to be taken with investment communications. In fact, our sense is that the FINRA guidance was received as a positive, in that it largely enables a firm’s Compliance department to establish parameters, including supervision. This involves more work, to be sure. Perhaps that’s a sign to investors how interested Twitter-adopting broker-dealers and registered investment advisory firms are in communicating via a channel that consumers and the media are gravitating toward.”
We haven’t seen any regulators comment on new headaches created by the need to address Twitter as a communication channel. Even if that were their feeling, isn’t it the regulators’ role to keep up with how communications evolve? As the recent FINRA Webinar made clear, Twitter adds to a firm’s Compliance burden, certainly. But we take the view that if the business believes Twitter is important, it’s an additional business requirement for Compliance to support.
We could see regulators having tweet-related headaches if there were communications abuses or investors were being duped in some way but, again, we have heard none of that. Have you? If so, please let us know below.
2. “…Experts say there’s nothing wrong with turning to a fund company or brokerage Web site for advice. But consider the source, says Seth Lipner, a law professor at Baruch College in New York. Even if that hot stock tip comes from a financial “pro,” investors should do their own research.”
Our comment:
“You and your readers are invited to stop over to AdvisorTweets.com to get a sense for the types of tweets advisors are sending. Investors who follow advisors’ tweets are likely to be better informed, thanks to the content being linked to and the observations being made about the markets, economy and personal finance. But, just to push back a tad on your last paragraph, what you won’t see in a tweet is investment advice. The advisors know better than that.”
This article wasn’t SmartMoney’s finest but by noon CDT it had been tweeted 25 times and it was one of the sixth most emailed articles.
If you’re inclined, you might consider commenting on it.
It’s Friday–And We Have Some #FFs For You
Mar 19th
There’s a saying that “All news is local”… so when we heard some Twitter usage stats last week, we took them to heart.
Overall, users are becoming more active on Twitter, according to Barracuda Labs. But only 21% of Twitter users are “true Twitter users”—defined as having at least 10 followers, following at least 10 people and having tweeted at least 10 times.
In the last six months, we have seen some new AdvisorTweets accounts burst onto the scene, struggle at finding their voice or interactions and then go dormant. This week we’ve resolved to do something about it. We’re taking responsibility for making our tiny piece of Twitter a more welcoming place.
We’ve added two pages to the AdvisorTweets blog:
- Why Tweet? (or least create a Twitter account and follow) WiredAdvisor’s Founder and CEO Stephanie Sammons wrote this page describing how advisors can benefit from Twitter.
- Who To Follow To date, we have abstained from the Follow Friday (#FF) practice because we thought we shouldn’t show preferential treatment. That was the reason we abstained from retweeting advisors’ tweets early on. (We’ve reversed ourselves on that stand and now you’ll find us retweeting to both endorse content and to give a little more profile to a newcomer advisor to Twitter.) Starting today on our Who To Follow page, we’re stepping up by recommending Twitter lists and listing individual advisors by their specialties, as extracted from their bios. Also, we have hesitated to use the @AdvisorTweets account to announce the addition of each individual advisor, and we’re still not going to do that. But we have created a new Twitter list called JustAdded for those of you who want to keep up with the new blood added to AdvisorTweets. We’ll keep advisors on the list for about a month.Finally, if it’s frequency you’re looking for (as well as quality), watch for our release of the top tweeters early next week.
As Compliance departments firm up their policies and procedures and unleash more and more FINRA-regulated advisors onto Twitter, we hope you’ll join us in giving them a warm welcome.
AT Advisors Lean Toward Twitter For Business, Facebook For Personal
Mar 11th
Recent surveys have found that financial advisors are most familiar with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, in that order. And, as was reported in a recent Rydex/SGI Advisor Benchmarking survey, twice as many advisors use Facebook than use Twitter.
But let’s not jump to the conclusion that Facebook is preferred. No survey that we’ve seen asked advisors which networking site is used for business.
Here’s what we’ve found in AdvisorTweets data that we’ve gathered over the last six months.
We assume that if a Twitter-using advisor is using Facebook for business, he or she will at some point send a tweet with a link to the Facebook page. But when we drilled into the data, we found that only 26 of “our” advisors included links to their own business Facebook pages in their tweets. So, we’re making an assumption that only 26 Twitter-using advisors have business Facebook pages. (By the way, we’ve added all to our AdvisorTweets Facebook favorite pages list. Please advise if we’ve missed your firm’s business page.)
We then took a look at the tweets that included the #fb hashtag and found that almost all (and many more than 26) of the advisors sending those tweets to Facebook had protected, personal pages. In other words, more Twitter-using advisors are using Twitter for business than are using Facebook. That’s especially interesting given that Facebook’s platform has an advantage–unlike with Twitter, advisors with no other Web presence can use it as their business’ Web site.
The still-small (357 as of today) AdvisorTweets universe is a good group to study because these advisors are familiar with Twitter. If we knew that they had an equal knowledge of Twitter and Facebook, we might be able to conclude that they’ve evaluated both and chose Twitter for business use. Instead, it’s possible that some advisors just adopted Twitter first and have yet to discover Facebook.
More needs to be learned about how advisors as a group view the value and purpose of the two networking sites. In recent media coverage and elsewhere, we have sensed a foregone conclusion that Twitter is somehow less viable for advisors. It’s still early, and we’d hate to see that thinking dissuade advisors from exploring Twitter or influence planning for resources (e.g., Compliance or Marketing) that advisors need to succeed on Twitter.
Our enthusiasm for Twitter extends beyond AdvisorTweets. Daily we see its power to enable business connections. But enough from us–financial advisors, what are your thoughts? We invite all comments below.
Financial Advisors, Are You Using RSS Feeds?
Mar 1st
We’d like to second the question that @AdvPerspectives asked this morning via Twitter. Advisor Perspectives is an online publication whose target audience includes fee-only financial advisors. We’ve been a fan but, because we’re mad RSS-users (and AdvisorTweets is riddled with them), we always wondered why the site didn’t offer RSS feeds.
As of today, they do (subscribe here), which they announced via Twitter. And they ended the tweet with the question we’d like to ask, as well: Is this valuable for you?
We care for a few reasons.
Financial advisors who tweet are managing a firehose of information. RSS can make your work easier and more enjoyable. Those of you who are actively creating content beyond Twitter also have reason to consider RSS for your sites. If you don’t use RSS but are curious, watch this excellent Brainshark tutorial from RidgeWorth Investments.
We believe that the lack of RSS feeds is one of the glaring deficiencies of asset manager sites and we consistently urge our Rock The Boat Marketing clients to add RSS. We specifically cite financial advisors as a key audience who will benefit by using RSS subscriptions as opposed to needing to continually check back on a site.
But if you, the most wired financial advisors (online and tweeting), say that you’re lukewarm on RSS, maybe we need to dial back the urgency of getting RSS added. (We still think it’s a must feature to offer for other content consumers, though.)
Please, we’d love to get your feedback–either comment below, reply via Twitter or send us an email.
