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.

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.