To succeed, financial advisors need above-average communications skills. But when most advisors showcased on AdvisorTweets.com went into the business, nobody said anything about anchorman comfort and charisma in front of a video camera.

We give lots of props to the advisors whose tweets lead us to video blogs they’re producing and starring in. Someday advisor videos will be as common and maybe even as templated as quarterly updates. But the range of videos and presentation styles today is varied enough to keep us checking out every advisor video mentioned in a tweet.

Here’s a sampling of some of the latest cuts from @bryanbinkholder @Road2WealthOKC @KimM53 and @OakParkPlanner. We’re not sure who created the last video in this collection, but we couldn’t resist since it features not one but two advisors @MattSapaula and @JJeffRose using Skype.

There was a tweet in the AdvisorTweets stream this morning that caught our fancy.

We regularly find ourselves in the position of defending both the value of Twitter in business to business managers and the efficiency of the platform to communications professionals.

We think that this tweet from @RussThornton (yes, we’ve written about him before and try not to but he’s a must-read on Twitter) is pretty powerful. It flies the flag for one of Russ’ services while advancing Russ’ value proposition. It’s a compact way of tooting his horn using a microphone (sorry for mixing the metaphors) that few of his FINRA-regulated competitors have access to.

The advantage of Twitter participation accrues over time as people begin to follow an account’s conversation. It’s unrealistic to expect too much of any one tweet. We have a hunch that this tweet will be more effective than most.

Quite a few financial advisors using social media are becoming expert marketers. We say that based on our observation of the Twitter-using advisors featured on AdvisorTweets.com. Many of their tweets link to a range of communications tactics being employed–and in some cases we have the opportunity to see their impact.

For example, over the last 12-18 months several advisors have used their social media participation to attract the attention of the media. Individual, mostly independent advisors (@behaviorgap, @curtisfinancial, @curtismithcfp to name just a few) have raised their profiles—and attracted new clients—based on their interactions with reporters.

We find the advisors’ success with this fascinating. While several resources exist to help financial advisors market themselves, the playbook has yet to be written about mastering the social media dance with the media. What best practices can social media-savvy advisors share with other advisors? How do reporters source topics and people to talk to? What advice can the media give advisors hoping to engage them using social media?

September 15 Webinar To Feature National, Regional Media

We’ll explore all that and more when we moderate a free Advisor Perspectives Webinar “Engage The Media Using Social Media” at 4 p.m. Eastern/3 p.m. Central Wednesday, September 15. Register here.

The Webinar will bring together these panelists:

Roger Wohlner, CFP, known on Twitter as @rwohlner Most recently, Wohlner was quoted in a widely circulated August 2, 2010, Wall Street Journal article “ETFs Shunned By Many Plans.” ETFs and 401(k)s are a subject Wohlner regularly tweets about. He’ll outline his social media activities, how they’ve led to heightened media attention and what that’s meant to his fee-only business.

Gail Marks Jarvis, award-winning syndicated personal finance columnist for the Chicago Tribune and author. On Twitter, she’s @GailMarksJarvis.

Robert Powell, MarketWatch.com Retirement blogger and editor of Retirement Weekly newsletter. On Twitter, he’s @RJPIII.

Brent Hunsberger, personal finance columnist at The Oregonian. On Twitter, he’s @onlymoney.

We’ll discuss:

• The role that press releases, email newsletters, blogs, social networking, search engine optimization and other tactics play in helping raise an advisor’s profile.
• How reporters prefer to be engaged online, along with a few tips for captivating them.
• How financial advisors can leverage their media mentions.

One benefit of participating in social media—“joining the conversation”—is the potential to influence the conversation. If you attend this hour-long Webinar live, you’ll have ample opportunity to get your questions answered about how to build a productive relationship with the media.

Hope to see you “there.”

Survey after survey suggests that marketing is a front-burner topic for financial advisors. Indeed, most of the advisors showcased on AdvisorTweets.com use their accounts to market what they know and what they offer.

In this guest post, @VitaVie (otherwise known as Kristin Harad, CFP®) provides tactical tips on another online marketing venture: advertising. Harad’s guidance is based on the 15 years she spent as a marketing and advertising executive prior to founding VitaVie Financial Planning in San Francisco. She also offers a series of free videos on marketing strategies for financial planners.)

Online advertising can be a cost-effective way to laser target your best prospects, yet few financial planners seem to have developed strategies that work. A recent marketing practices survey by the FPA (Financial Planning Association) found that less than 10% of planners utilize online advertising, and of those who do, less than 40% are satisfied with how it is performing for them.

While online advertising may not be able to single-handedly fill your prospect pipeline, I’ve found steady success with it and recommend that you include it in your marketing mix. You are in complete control of your budget, and for as little as $50 per month a well constructed campaign can consistently attract new prospects.

The secret to success with online advertising is to define your target market as narrowly as possible, and then present your prospects with a compelling message that speaks exactly to them.

Some planners may be trying to reach as few as just several dozen people via online advertising each month and then dazzle them with an exact match to what their needs are. Use online advertising to begin the conversation. You are not going to instantly convert someone who clicks on a 95-character text ad into a multi-thousand dollar customer relationship. Design landing pages with compelling incremental steps toward getting to know you better–give away a highly relevant free report, invite them to attend a workshop that addresses their current challenges or entice them to sign up for your email newsletter. You’ll gain a quality (virtual) introduction and permission to further develop the relationship with follow-up communications.

I recommend that financial planners explore four online advertising venues:

Facebook Ads Can Be Targeted

Facebook is the second most popular site on the Internet, and it offers a powerful ad targeting tool. You can easily create ads in the Facebook online interface and target prospects not just by demographics and geography, but also by school, employer and keyword. For example, you can create ads offering a free report on a specific company’s stock performance and then show ads for that report exclusively to local employees of that company. Prices vary by targeting and ad performance, but are usually less than $1 per click!

Yelp Ads Reach Investors Who Are Looking

While Yelp is most famous for restaurant and entertainment reviews, a growing number of consumers are also turning to it to find doctors, lawyers and financial advisors. Yelp recently debuted a pay-per-click advertising program that will display your company’s listing at the top of related searches for $1 to $2 per click. (These rates will purportedly increase substantially once the program concludes its testing phase.)

Yelp doesn’t offer keyword targeting, so you have less control over where your ads will appear than other services provide, but most users browsing or searching for financial planners are likely actively seeking to hire someone. Be sure to explicitly state what types of clients you work with and the services you offer to best attract the right kind of prospects to click on your ads, while filtering out click costs from those who are clearly not a fit.

Competition Makes Google AdWords Pricey

Google’s advertising platform is the dominant player in pay-per-click advertising, displaying millions of ubiquitous ads each day on Google search results and millions of other Web sites of all sizes. I advise caution in advertising on Google for several reasons.

First, AdWords offers an opaque marketplace (the highest bidder is not necessarily the winner), and novice advertisers can quickly find their entire budget consumed with little to show for it. Click costs for terms related to financial planning are very high, often in the $5 to $10 per click range, inflated in part by the preponderance of advertising from financial planning certificate programs and lead generation programs.

If you’d like to test Google, focus your ads on only the geography that you serve and be sure to set a low spending cap as you familiarize yourself with Google’s system and monitor campaign performance. Also, think creatively about keywords that you target, rather than going straight into the headwind of terms related to financial planning. If you focus on serving women going through a divorce, keywords related divorce self-help may be much more effective and affordable.

Niche Web Sites Appropriate, Affordable

The best place to advertise is where you know your ideal prospects are already actively engaged. If you have effectively defined your niche, you’ll know the generally off-the-beaten-path that your clients frequent. These are often small, local Web sites with very affordable advertising rates–in some cases, you may even be the first and only advertiser! For example, my practice works with new parents and young families in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nearly all of my clients belong to the mothers/parents club in their city or town, and I am able to purchase large display ads on each club’s Web site for as little as $80 per month.

It takes some creativity, testing and patience to find success with online advertising, but I encourage you experiment with this advertising channel!

The transparency of social media–the phrase can sound like esoteric mumbo jumbo even to those of us who invoke it all the time.

But we’ve come across a couple of instances this week of investment advisors using social media to open up and share how they do business with the broad Internet population. In both cases, the content was created for a physical audience and then published online.

First up is the tweet from @SavantTweets offering their outlook for 2010 and beyond via a replay of their “The Road to Recovery.” I have to admit that it sounded a bit dated to me but I followed the tweet anyway and landed on a seven-part 2010 Client Dinner and Town Hall presentation.

Most interesting to advisors, perhaps, is what Savant says about its capabilities and its streamlined approach to communicating this year. Savant Managing Director Thomas Muldowney, by the way, was recognized on Forbes’ list of the Top 50 Fee-Only Advisors earlier this year.

Our second example is from @CaleInTheKeys, whose blog offers a four-part presentation from a recent workshop on running a spoke fund company on the FOLIOfn platform. We’ve embedded one of the presentations below but encourage you to visit the blog for the full series and commentary.

We especially appreciated the response to a query from one of the blog’s visitors about the bps shown in the deck.

“Ah, yes, good catch, Dan. I don’t think I had discussed Folio’s fees to my investors prior to this during the workshop, but you’re right in that if that 3rd slide were to reflect my own fees accurately, it should reflect 95 bips (my 1.25% fee includes a 0.30% fee that goes right to FOLIOfn for all their custodial services),” replied Cale Smith, portfolio manager at Islamorada Investment Management in the Florida Keys.

Advisor Websites published the results of some survey data today that we thought we’d call your attention to and then refer you over to their site for the complete report. More than 600 advisors, financial planners and managers of financial/investment firms were surveyed in April and May about effective marketing techniques.

Most interesting to us? Social media is placing a respectable #2 as a technique to use with prospects (after face-to-face events) and #3 as a technique to use with clients (after face-to-face events and email).

The survey also asked the very direct question, “Is it worth it?” And we’ll admit to chuckling when we saw the 25% neutral bar. Yes, the return on social media can be so elusive that survey respondents can’t even venture an answer.

But for the advisors showcased on AdvisorTweets.com and for the rest of us who believe in the benefits of social networking, here, too, the data is going in the right direction.

All financial advisors are the same and none deliver the value they claim to.

It’s a recurring theme in comments on online media content about financial advisors. Today’s post is prompted by the Barron’s Top 1,000 Financial Advisors list, an annual feature that attracted zero comments this time last year but has 17 comments so far this weekend.  The tone reminded us of the readers’ comments (52) on a New York Times article in October 2009 about financial planners.

In general, commenters are using the broadest of brushes to negatively characterize financial advisors and the services they provide.

And Barron’s is catching some heat, too, for its advisor metrics. One commenter questions: “Why aren’t the average performance of the advisor’s accounts given? Ninety seven per cent retention rate says more about salesmanship than the advisors’ abilities.” And, a few savvy writers note the reprint revenue to be expected from producing such lists.

We contrast the gist of these comments with the content and tone of the individual financial advisors’ tweets we see in the daily AdvisorTweets stream. Twitter—and other forms of social media—affords advisors visibility with which many are building credible personal brands that help set them apart from what “everybody” considers the “typical” financial advisor.

An investor couldn’t select a financial advisor on the basis of the Barron’s list but just might learn something about an advisor whose tweets he or she follows.