Using Wordle word cloud, this is a visual representation of the most common language used on the AdvisorTweets blog. Pat Allen did a fantastic job at analyzing what was happening in the world of financial advisors on Twitter, and Smarsh would like to continue that tradition on the AdvisorTweets blog.

With that said what would you like to see on AdvisorTweets? Want to submit a guest blog post and lend your voice to the community? Email info@advisortweets.com or send a tweet my way at @AdvisorTweets.

Adam Bullock
@AdamatSmarsh

April Fool’s Day was last Thursday, right? Thought so but AdvisorTweets got punked early this morning.

If you came to the site, saw our Twitter page or subscribe to a service that notifies you about un-follows, you might be interested in hearing why AdvisorTweets just upped and un-followed everybody today–everybody but @MarcusGrooms (for reasons we don’t know).

I would have taken a screenshot of the sparkling white site but the look of it gave me the same feeling I had when I saw that blender shred the iPad earlier in the week. Now, that’s not right!

So, here’s what our developers say happened, based on our log files. An Alexa robot landed on the site and somehow spidered its way into our admin page, which was somehow exposed (not anymore, it isn’t!). The admin is our control center, where we add and subtract (rarely) advisors to the site.

Once on the admin page, the robot started following links. It systematically un-followed every darn advisor we’ve painstakingly added to the site since September–with the exception of @MarcusGrooms, who was singlehandedly bearing the advisor flag on AdvisorTweets most of the day.

Luckily, we know who we follow so we manually added names back. It will take the counter a while to climb back up as it’s triggered when an advisor tweets the first time after having been added to the database. Six advisors who we have followed have subsequently protected their accounts and we can’t re-follow them.

Unfortunately, the database you see has been reset to today. We’ve lost our historical tweets and links and trending themes and tags. Spilt milk at this point.

Thanks to those of you who inquired about our whereabouts today. Now that all the cobwebs have been cleared, we’re back and ready to showcase your tweets.

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.

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.