How Social Media Is Influencing Institutional Investor Investment Decisions

If your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm markets to institutional investors, you’ll want to check out social media survey results that “astounded” the research firm and “awed” an asset management marketer. Social media, the data suggests, is making a difference not only in how institutional investors source information but in the subsequent action they take, too.

In November and December 2014, Greenwich Associates, working with LinkedIn, fielded an online survey of 256 global institutional investors including 100 in North America, 105 in Europe and 51 in the Asia Pacific. The survey targeted decision-makers and influencers of investment decisions at their institution (top three titles: chief investment officer, portfolio manager, investment analyst) who used digital platforms at least once in the past year to learn about financial topics related to their investing role.

The global cut of the results was the focus of a LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Webcast last week, whose replay you can listen to below. In addition to Greenwich and LinkedIn presenters, Legg Mason’s Director and Head of Global Web Services Kerry Ryan presented best practices and results to date of some LinkedIn success using sponsored update campaigns to target institutional investors.

A report on the Europe-only survey data is due this week, with a report on the North America results scheduled to be released next month. Expect there to be some differences from the global cut, according to the presenters.  

LinkedIn, Facebook And Twitter

Most surprising to Greenwich’s Managing Director Dan Connell and Ryan was that one-third of investors surveyed said they’d taken information learned via social media to start a discussion with or choose to work with a particular asset management firm. This is the first work to document this, I'm fairly certain, and the research may open many eyes.

As he reviewed the results, Connell seemed delighted to report that LinkedIn scored as the preferred social media source, with 48% of all institutional investors using the platform. The first slide showing the usage of the social networks even grays out all but LinkedIn.

In my opinion, such parochialism—and as interesting as it was, the inclusion of a happy LinkedIn advertiser as part of the program—devalues the independence of the research. The work also includes useful insights on investors’ reliance on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and can serve a higher purpose than just to support interest in LinkedIn. The following is a screenshot of one of the slides, with annotations added by me.

One surprise not discussed, for example: Almost half of institutional investors (47%) say they use Facebook to learn about investment products/services. This is slightly higher than those who use LinkedIn for that purpose (45%). The finding is at odds, by the way, with what ShareThis reported about the finance content that gets shared on Facebook. 

Notwithstanding the cheerleading for LinkedIn, the full 56-minute presentation is worth your attention. Here are just a few highlights to pique your interest and prompt you to hit the play button. 

• Nearly all (97%) institutional investors use digital media sources for professional purposes and 79% use social media at work. That's a dramatic change in the last five years, Connell noted.
• Institutional investors are turning to social media for insights, opinions and content relevant to their investing roles. And, those insights are influencing decision-making.
• The survey provides four answers related to investors’ interest in asset management firm content and executives specifically, and other answers related to investment product and services are relevant, too. Are you working with executives who are dragging their heels about whether they need to have a social media (probably LinkedIn) presence? Data in this table, which I created to highlight the asset management questions, might be helpful.

• Legg Mason’s 22 sponsored updates have produced an overall 0.48% clickthrough rate and 0.54% engagement rate. Since the start of the year, the company page has attracted 346 new followers. 

Before You Go All-In On Facebook

“We’re starting to think more seriously about Facebook…”

I’ve heard this more than a few times from firms over the last six months. Typically, the firm has excelled with something else social (e.g., blog, Twitter account or LinkedIn company page) and believes it’s ready for something more challenging while potentially more rewarding.

The size of the social network itself (890 million daily active users in December 2014), its 2014 surge and the engagement potential all make Facebook impossible to ignore if you’re a marketer in 2015.

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers absolutely should consider participation (beyond the base camps many have already set up) on Facebook for their own strategies. Not knowing what your business or marketing objectives are, not knowing what your client composition is, not knowing what your content and other resources are, etc., I can’t go much further than this.

…Except to encourage you to temper your enthusiasm by drilling into Facebook’s sensational traffic and engagement numbers. Financial services, let alone business-to-business organizations, cannot expect the same pick-up that other industries famously experience.

For some level-setting, let’s first take a broad look at social media and financial services. Afterward, we’ll zero in on Facebook.

10 Finserv Brands Dominate

There’s no shortage of ebooks and whitepapers about social media and financial services, but this Shareablee presentation delivered at a State of Financial Services Webinar in late November is distinguished by the data it presents. Unfortunately, the Webinar isn’t available on-demand.

Shareablee takes care to report financial services subsegments, noting that the lowest percentage (61%) of Investment Products & Services brands have social presences. Banking, insurance, loans and even payment services brands are more active. Data quoted is from January through October 2014. Note that LinkedIn isn't a platform included in this report. The annotations on the following slides are from me.

Within Shareablee's Investment Products & Services brands category are diversified firms and brokerages that are probably beyond your competitive set. They command the greatest share of voice.

Here’s the sobering slide: The top 10 brands dominate, representing 66% of all activity. If you’ve been successful, by your standards, with anything in social media, you are to be congratulated. It’s not easy to make an impact.

Next check out the Shareablee slide of Facebook sharing in particular. Despite all the hoopla about Facebook in 2014 and despite the pick-up of insurance and banking content, note the so-so sharing of investment product/service content.

This gets to the core content challenge of asset manager posts on Facebook. If you are not a Fidelity or Vanguard, if you don't sponsor community outreach programs (e.g., charitable benefits or sporting events), if you're new to engaging with a community and if the bulk of what you have to post is investment strategy and market insights, let’s be realistic about how much sharing your repurposed posts are going to get. How comfortable is a suit and tie at a barbecue?  

Minor digression: Before we leave the Shareablee deck, see the slide that shows the types of posts that people engage with. Across all financial services segments—but especially investment products and services—it’s photos! If you make just one tweak to your social strategy in all of 2015, please let it be to post more images.  

Does Facebook Drive Traffic?

Why take on another social network and especially Facebook? To drive both brand awareness and Website traffic. So, does Facebook drive traffic? All of the above was a prelude to encouraging Facebook-aspirants to watch the following Whiteboard Friday video, published on The Moz Blog last week. A transcript is also available on the page. 

It’s an engaging 17 minutes but if you’re short on time, here are a few highlights.

4:00: The Moz’s Rand Fishkin says the average page per visit of a Facebook visitor is about 1. “It tends to be the case that when you're in that Facebook feed, you're just trying to consume content, and you might see something, but you're unlikely to browse around the rest of the Website from which it came.” 

This compares to the average 3-5 pages consumed by people who arrive directly on your site and to Google search-sourced visits (2-2.5 pages on average). Obviously, you’ll want check your analytics to see how your various traffic sources perform.

6:48: But, Fishkin notes, “Facebook's likes and shares are very indicative of the kinds of content that tend to perform well in search. So, if we can nail that, if we understand what kinds of content get spread socially on the Web and engage people on the social Web, we tend to also perform well in the kind of content we create for search engines.”

7:38: Fishkin begins his top 10 tips for Facebook optimization. 

8:56: A social referral/introduction may lead to subsequent Website exploration. Here's a brief discussion of setting up analytics to track future visits from social referrals, and see this post for more.

12:43: Fishkin discusses limitations on the reach of brand content, a relatively recent adjustment Facebook made to dim the effect of what had been overwhelming brand content. The objective is to enable personal content, typically valued by users more, to resurface.

14:27: Facebook is difficult to "game" nowadays but it is still possible to “game human psychology,” says Fishkin. “If you can find the angles that people care about, that they're vocal about, that they get engaged, excited, angry, passionate, of any emotional variety about those things, that's how you tend to trigger a lot of activity on Facebook,” he says. Don't produce that kind of content yet? You'll need to.

If Facebook is a frontier you aim to settle in 2015, I'm rooting for you. Of course, an asset manager can succeed on Facebook. Just do your preparation, make sure you understand the level of new effort required, including some level of advertising spending, and be sure to track your results/effectiveness.

Asset Manager Content Sharing Takes Off—Don’t Be Left Behind

There was a time not too long ago—seven months ago-ish—when the sharing of content published on mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Websites was at low levels across the board.

That’s changing.

A comparison between the September 2013 sharing of content on the sites I blogged about in October with sharing in April 2014 shows that some fund companies are beginning to see significant sharing to social networks. Primarily to LinkedIn but not exclusively. The gains are stunning for BlackRock. Other firms are participating too, as you'll see below.

Why Isn’t Your Content Being Shared?

As for those of you whose content isn’t attracting the support you would hope for, it’s time to delve into why.

When nothing much is happening for your peers either, it’s easy to shrug your shoulders—i.e., uh, maybe nobody shares investment content. But now that others are starting to experience more of a social lift, what's keeping your content from participating? Let’s answer the question with a few questions: 

• Are you making it possible to share? If you’re still publishing your commentary via Adobe Acrobat files, none of this applies to you. PDFs don’t get shared on social networks. Even if you and your content team are knocking yourselves out with the narrative and the graphics, you can’t be a contender and that’s unfortunate. This is particularly true of smaller firms—firms whose limited marketing resources could most benefit from a little help from others.

If at all possible with the Compliance direction at your firm and your Web publishing capability (or whatever it is that prompted you to default to PDFs in the first place), I’d find a way to add some HTML commentary to your site, along with social sharing icons.

• How visible is your content? Waiting for others to find your content and pass it around is one way to go. The more effective way is to use your firm's own social accounts to call attention. 

Investment content sharing happens on four networks: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The data suggest that the most significant thing you can do to increase the visibility of the content you publish is to post it as a company update to LinkedIn. If you’re not doing that yet, I’d make it a priority.

A company presence on LinkedIn, hopefully buoyed by some support of your loyalist followers and even employees (where possible), should make a difference.

What we don’t know is the extent to which firms are paying for broader exposure through LinkedIn sponsored updates or advertising. That is the X factor. However, to my knowledge, there is no way to buy shares. Followers yes, but shares still need to be earned.

As shown on the graphs, LinkedIn casts the longest shadow here. There’s no site I looked at where tweets generated the most shares in April. But I want to put a word in for Twitter. Twitter is an effective means of calling attention to the availability and relevance of your content to the world at large, including topical news-hungry financial advisors, the media and other influential accounts. As impressive as the LinkedIn numbers are, don’t underestimate the power and reach of a few tweets. 

Facebook may be fading as a network where investment firm content gets shared to. In the set of data I looked at, Facebook shares were most important to Franklin Templeton's Beyond Bulls & Bears blog in the fall. That contribution seems to have dimmed since the start of the year (see below).

Google+ is a no-show in this data. With the singular exception of the Vanguard experience, little content produced by investment firms has been shared there over the last seven months. Now, after the surprise departure last week of Google+'s business leader and reported staff reorganizations, the prospects for the platform as a whole is in question.

• Is your content visually appealing? A sea of gray text is going to get you and your content nowhere. You need images—lists, charts, even stock photos. And how about some subheads or pull-quotes to give your content a fighting chance?   

• What’s the quality of your content? The availability, visibility and appeal of the look of the content is where most firms need to focus, I suspect. But in my analysis, I did come across a few firms that were posting to LinkedIn and not seeing much sharing. 

Creativity in this space and elsewhere has raised the content bar. You can’t expect to attract many eyeballs, let alone stimulate sharing by publishing one post after another all with the headline “Market Update.”

As difficult as this conversation may be with your content creators, you need to have it, to make the most of your collective effort. Take the data with you to the meeting. 

Some Sharing Successes

My analysis in October looked at the sharing of investment commentary-type content published, mostly on blogs, by 10 firms (AllianceBernstein, BlackRock, First Trust, Franklin Templeton, Guggenheim, MFS, OppenheimerFunds, PIMCO, Vanguard and WisdomTree). I used the SharedCount multi-URL dashboard to look at how many times a URL was shared on social networks. This data should be reliable as it’s based on direct queries to the networks.

Included were URLs to all posts published by the firms in September, a total of 111 posts. The mix included 22 updates from BlackRock on the high end and 4 from MFS on the low end.

Please see the post for the full report. To give you an idea, content published on all 10 domains resulted in 1,500 shares on LinkedIn. 

After recently noticing much more sharing on some sites, I decided to return to SharedCount for an update.

Sure enough, sharing is up across the board. 

If I were a digital marketer at a firm not benefitting from sharing, I might be tempted to discount the BlackRock results. There can be only one BlackRock and you may never be able to match BlackRock’s blog post production (21 posts in one month), helping drive 7,400-plus shares.  

But the pattern across multiple firms suggests that sharing of your content should be on the rise, too, regardless of the size of your brand’s footprint or even how often you publish. One of the blogs I looked at earlier was MFS’ On The Lookout, which published five posts in September. There were just two postings in April and yet one post produced 77 LinkedIn shares versus 5 total LinkedIn shares of all five September posts.

What's more, the sharing has been building. To confirm this, I analyzed the URLs of all BlackRock (the most prolific blog in this set, consistently producing 20-plus posts each month) and Guggenheim (the least prolific, producing a steady four Macro View posts a month) content published from September through April. Who's to say that April represents the top?

The additional graphs that follow are included not for the absolute numbers involved but to show the change.

What are your thoughts?

Some Level-Setting About The Sharing Of Mutual Fund And ETF Content

Investment firm marketers need to take what’s known and reported about the social networks overall and then do their own thinking about the opportunities for the business they’re in and for their firms.

That second step is important, given the hoopla surrounding social media activity and results. Some of what builds expectations about the benefits of social media doesn’t apply to the largely business-to-business wholesale distribution context that most mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms operate in.

Interest in social interaction is keen for several reasons. There’s the opportunity to build awareness by being social and there’s the potential to demonstrate relevance as a member of an online community. Near the top of the list of reasons, in part because it’s eminently measureable, is the promise that social networks will help spread asset manager-authored content. It’s a wish, a hope and a prayer of firms that have social accounts and also those that don’t.

How much sharing of homegrown investment company content is there, really? 

Based On A Sampling Of September Posts

You and your firm have access to the best, most complete data on usage of your own content, including Web analytics. But to get a sense of what’s happening across the board, I’ve reviewed some sharing data across a sampling of continuously content-producing asset manager sites.

My objective wasn’t to identify what firm's content is being shared the most. Sharing is a function of the size of the audience initially reached, which in turn is a function of brand, promotion, firm size, energy the firm devotes to social networks, timing of the content posting, etcetera etcetera.

For this exercise, the focus was on the extent to which content published on mutual fund and ETF domains gets a lift from those who share links to their social networks. Based on the social sharing counters on some sites and on some other signs, I had a hunch.

Please note that what follows is a look at asset manager content sharing that’s limited in scope and time. The review was contained to investment commentary-type content published, mostly on blogs, by 10 firms. Included were all posts published by these firms in September, a total of 111 posts. The mix included 22 updates in the month from BlackRock on the high end and 4 from MFS on the low end. An additional 22 financial advisor-directed September posts also were reviewed, you'll read more below about those. 

The sites whose content was included:

• Context, the AllianceBernstein Blog on Investing
• The BlackRock Blog
• The First Trust Economics Blog
• Beyond Bulls & Bears, Franklin Templeton 
• Guggenheim Partners' Macro Views
• On the Lookout, MFS 
• OppenheimerFunds' Blog
• PIMCO Insights
• Vanguard Blog
• The WisdomTree Blog

The tool I used was the SharedCount multi-URL dashboard, which I believe to be reliable based on checks against my own site and other sites’ analytics. A few counts disagree with the counts published in the social sharing icons on a few asset manager sites.

SharedCount reports on multiple sites, but sharing of investment company content appears to be contained to four sites: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. 

I looked at the September URLs from the sites and then exported and combined the sharing data as of October 15 to produce scatter charts. You could do the same with your competitive set.

A Few General Insights

This data suggests:

• We may need some level-setting about the prospects for others’ sharing the content that firms create and publish on their own domains. As you’ll see below, sharing is at low levels, most definitely not on the same scale as in other industries. 
• It’s unrealistic to expect all content to be shared to the same extent. Your content portfolio is going to have top performers and also-rans. According to an InboundWriter study published in September, 20% of companies’ online content drives 90% of their Web traffic. 
• At the same time, we may need a reality check about what’s shareworthy. People share content they believe others will respond to. In that respect, market and investment commentary—the bread and butter of asset manager content—has a few strikes against it. It can be dry, esoteric and, occasionally in this polarized environment, explicitly or implicitly political. To think more about why people share, I recommend that you download The Psychology of Sharing, published by The New York Times last year.
• If you're serious about supporting the sharing of your content, you might take a look at how you present your social sharing icons. Move them up top and make them so big that they're impossible to miss.
• Firms large and small are reporting more success with their content syndication efforts. Making content available on other, better trafficked sites with better reader engagement is a critical piece to making sure your content gets the attention it deserves. 

LinkedIn

Public sharing from asset manager domains to social networks is at its highest on LinkedIn, based on how LinkedIn sharing (1,533 total shares) trounced all other sharing to other networks in September. Here's a look at the distribution of the LinkedIn sharing data from each September post. 

Even so, few asset manager posts attracted more than 50 shares in September. See the Track Social site for an idea of how leading brands are doing. The top 10 brands on LinkedIn attracted more than 3,700 Likes last week—with LinkedIn itself topping the leaderboard with almost 15,000 Likes.  

Facebook

A total 722 Facebook Likes and Shares ranked Facebook second on the list of shared mutual fund and ETF domain content published in September. Facebook users' support of Franklin Templeton content had a lot to do with it.

For reference, according to Track Social, the top 10 brands got at least 45,000 Likes on their posts per day, as of data reported last week. Fox News tops the list with 117,000 Likes per day. 

Twitter

Most September asset manager posts prompted fewer than 20 tweets, for a total of 601 shares.

The Track Social data is not relevant here because the closest measure would be to look at brand retweets. However, not everything that a brand tweets is about content it’s posted on its domain. The top 10 brands got more than 4,000 retweets of their tweets per day last week, with ESPN getting more than 15,000 retweets. Yes, not much of a benchmark for this space.

A low level of content shares will limit a firm’s prospects for awareness-raising and relevance. But remember that this kind of content-sharing analysis goes only so far. The next step is to understand the amplification effect of the content shares.

Amplification is something that Twitter is particularly good at, and fortunately for us, several tools are available to analyze what’s happening for an account on Twitter, including its reach and even effectiveness.

Below is a screenshot from Topsy showing the total number of tweets and the total number of “highly influential tweets” to a PIMCO post. Topsy tags the top 0.2% most influential of all Twitter users as “highly influential," and “influential” tags are used for the top 0.5% most influential Twitter users. 

Fewer Twitter shares by influential accounts capable of amplification have the potential to get you just as much or more reach than LinkedIn shares by accounts with limited connections and reach. Unfortunately, in a spotcheck of Topsy of the September posts in our sample, very few were tweeted by highly influential accounts. And, that’s something to work on. I would do that before I gave up on Twitter.

Google+

Google+ brings up the rear, with asset manager September content appearing only rarely (20 shares in total) on public posts. It’s possible that more sharing is happening in private posts, not trackable by SharedCount.

Content shares on top-performing brand Google+ pages are much lower, too. The top 10 brands got about 117 shares, with YouTube topping the Track Social list with 313 shares, last week.

Financial Advisor Content Sharing

We’ve taken a look previously at where financial advisors are sharing content, thanks to the data that RegEd Arkovi regularly publishes. It’s a safe guess that those shares include asset manager-created content.

But, an analysis of the content published on blogs that are specifically published for advisors shows even lower level sharing. Included in the analysis were September posts from:

• Putnam Investments' Advisor Tech Tips blog
• Russell Investments' Helping Advisors blog
• SEI's Practically Speaking blog
• Vanguard Blog for Advisors

LinkedIn is again the network the advisor-directed content is most shared to, followed by Twitter.

  

Let's start with the fact that the universe of potential sharers is small. And, a fraction of the approximately 300,000 U.S. financial advisors have social accounts and are likely to be sharing content on any given day. Also, surfacing content that other advisors will find valuable is not an advisor’s first priority in establishing a social presence.

A cursory review of other advisor-directed Websites (media sites and prominent bloggers) suggests more sharing than asset managers are experiencing. Unknown, though, is how many of the sharers are advisors versus others in the financial advisor ecosystem. On those sites, sharing via Twitter rivals the level of LinkedIn sharing.

Thoughts? Your comments are welcome below.

Putnam Social Media Research Provides Insights And Data To Slice And Dice

Early discussions about financial advisors’ use of social media gravitate to the same three questions, which I’ve paraphrased to capture a bit of the skepticism:

• “Of course, they have a LinkedIn profile, but what’s social about that?”
• “Well, they may have accounts but their Compliance departments don’t let them really do anything, do they?”
• “Yes, but are ‘our’ advisors—you know, the ones with the assets—really using it? Really?”

With the research it’s releasing today, Putnam adds to the collective understanding of how advisors use social media as a marketing, networking and relationship tool. Some of the data aligns with other research (including the authoritative work done annually by American Century) and is unsurprising. At the highest level, 75% of advisors use at least one social network for business, and eight out of 10 name LinkedIn as their primary network.

But there’s also a lot that’s new here. I’m going to cherry-pick but encourage you to review the full results.

The "Putnam Investments Survey of Financial Advisors’ Use of Social Media" (see infographic, a link to the full press release will follow when it's available) was conducted by FTI Consulting in July 2013, based on a survey of 408 U.S.-based financial advisors. More than half (54%) of the respondents are affiliated with independent broker-dealers, 17% national broker-dealers, 13% regional broker-dealers. The others have insurance, bank and financial planner affiliations.

Most exciting for some of us is the data visualization capability accompanying the research. Putnam has published the data in a workbook accessible via a public (free) version of Tableau software. This enables users to view the data distribution and even do their own slicing and dicing. 

“It's all about data discoverability, open-source data, and collaborative use of data. So, have at it,” Putnam Social Media Director Jayme Lacour told me.

The question never asked: Advisors on Google+

Before we look at how the Putnam research provides insights to the most frequently asked questions, I’ll call your attention to the data on advisor use of the sleeper social network: Google+. People rarely ask about Google+ and yet advisor use of it ranks much higher than most people would have guessed. Almost one-third of advisors surveyed (31%) used in it in the past year for business purposes; it’s second only to LinkedIn.

Overall, while LinkedIn is the most used social network, Facebook consistently ranks #2, largely in relationship management activities. The screenshot below is from the data viz page.

This data is reminiscent of similar questions that appeared in a previous FTI Consulting study done in conjunction with LinkedIn. The graph below is from the May 2012 Financial Advisors’ Use of Social Media Moves from Early Adoption to Mainstream research. 

These are two different surveys, but the dimensions are so similar I can’t resist comparing the findings and wondering whether a few differences reflect an evolution in the networks advisors prefer to use.

While the datapoints are different in the Putnam work, most of the order of the preferred networks is unchanged from the earlier research. Two exceptions relate to the prominence of Facebook as a means of enhancing current relationships and cultivating client prospects.

Twitter does not stand out in the Putnam research, except on a dimension that asset managers have keen interest in. Note that it is the preferred network for cascading thought leadership. That’s a much stronger showing than in the LinkedIn/FTI Consulting work a year ago when LinkedIn towered over all in that category.

Oh and elsewhere in the data you'll see that 58% of advisors say their usage of Twitter has increased in the last year, closely following 61% who report increased LinkedIn usage.

Q. “Of course, they have a LinkedIn profile, but what’s social about that?”

Take a look at the activities reported in the research and you’ll see that advisors who consider LinkedIn their primary social network are doing more than maintaining LinkedIn profiles.

The infographic reports on six activities but you’ll see a dozen total LinkedIn activities on the data viz page.

This may be the most encompassing look at advisors’ participation on LinkedIn. It was smart, for example, to ask whether advisors can access LinkedIn at work and whether advisors follow companies. For next time: What percentage are using the Contacts mobile app? What percentage are following the LinkedIn thought leaders? How many are customizing their LinkedIn updates? All have bearing on asset manager content marketing initiatives.

Putnam has more than research interest in LinkedIn. As you may recall, the firm broke new ground earlier this year when it empowered its wholesalers to engage with advisors on LinkedIn.  

Q. Well, they may have accounts but their Compliance departments don’t let them really do anything, do they?

The screenshot above of advisors’ LinkedIn activities is from the intriguing Activities tab on the data viz site. On the page you’ll see a rich list of possible activities that advisors could and do engage in on the other surveyed platforms: Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Unfortunately, Putnam chose to report the data by advisors’ primary network. Given LinkedIn’s dominance in the survey, the result is that low levels of data are reported for the other networks.

Other surveys have asked advisors to identify a primary social network, too, but this is an artificial construct. In this case, it diminishes the value of the data that could be collected to report on what advisors do on all networks.

Proceed with caution and be sure to note the sample sizes when considering the Activities data that's being shared.

Also, Twitter gets short shrift in the list of surveyed activities. Following and maintaining Twitter lists are two activities to report on next time, for example. 

Q. Yes but are “our” advisors—you know, the ones with the assets—really using it? Really?

This is the acid test for most mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms evaluating the opportunity today in social media.

Putnam’s work is not the first to seek to provide insight. When Accenture reported in March of this year, it surveyed 400 advisors including 250 brokerage/wirehouse/bank advisors and 150 advisors who were independent or represented a regional bank or insurance firm and reported very different results. According to its research, nearly half (48%) of financial advisors are using social media on a daily basis to interact with their clients—most of whom (60%) were reported to have assets of more than $20 million. Hmm, many found that hard to believe.

Putnam’s profile of The Social Advisor—which they defined as the advisor who uses social media on a daily basis—confirms the views of social media skeptics. Daily social media-using advisors look to be a little light in the AUM and in the average client portfolio, when compared both to the Accenture findings and to the characteristics of RIAs, as reported in Cerulli Associates' "State of the RIA Marketplace 2012." This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, note. Not all Putnam respondents were RIAs.

However, advisors surveyed report a return on the investment they make in social media as a form of connecting. Almost one-half (49%) of advisors say they acquired new clients through social networks and of those, 29% gained over $1 million in new assets, Putnam research reported.

And—in a move that might be most useful to broker-dealers and individual advisors—Putnam goes a step further and uses the data to map the states where the new clients and assets came from. The darker the blue, the more successful the social media participation. Sweet.