Financial advisors have been stepping up their tweets on and links to articles and commentary about a new rule that goes into effect in January that enables more taxpayers to convert their IRAs to Roth IRAs. (For more information, see Sunday’s Wall Street Journal article “Get Ready for 2010–The Year of the Roth IRA” and the several accompanying comments.)

“Roth IRA” is a search topic that has seasonal interest, according to Google Trends U.S. search traffic over the last several years, as shown below. The second graph is of just U.S. traffic over the last 12 months.

Search interest has yet to materialize late in 2009. This is unremarkable in itself. While searchers’ interest in the term spikes in the first four months of the year leading up to the April 15 tax filing deadline, overall interest has steadily declined since 2005. With next year’s change, that trend could reverse in the next several months.

Even as news coverage about the change spiked this fall, searchers seem to have been unmoved–they’re not searching for much information on the change yet.

The media are going to continue to report on the changed rules, of course, and offline financial and tax advisors will no doubt use their traditional means to notify their clients about the opportunity.

By providing early, continual commentary about issues influencing the Roth IRA conversion, financial advisors using Twitter are demonstrating their marketing savvy as well as keeping their followers better informed. Remember that you can use the Search box to find Roth-related tweets.