Marketing At The Morningstar Conference: Finserv Goes Funserv

Instead of publishing a blog post related to asset management marketing last Thursday, I headed over to the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago (my hometown) to see what I could see in action. I didn’t expect to meet up with many marketers onsite, and didn’t, but I certainly saw a lot of your work.

What follows are a few random, ragged observations. The overall event itself was packed with information and opportunity. Congratulations to Morningstar's Leslie Marshall, Director – Events, Magazine and Social Media, and the entire conference team, and my thanks for having me as a guest.

MainStay: In It To Win It

MainStay Investments was at the conference to win it. The firm has had a great couple of years, and it’s a reasonable assumption that advisors would have more than a little interest in the MainStay booth. Why not test some cool tech to drive engagement?

In this video, Frank Ranu, Senior Associate, Social Media Digital and Creative Services, explains an innovative Morningstar-focused campaign that involves a box of Cracker Jack, a smartphone app (Taggar) and a woman who walks out from around the box of Cracker Jack to greet Morningstar attendees and encourage them to enter a contest.

This was a campaign with more than a few pieces, and Frank’s analytics suggest it was positively received.

A Slice Of Life

Over at the William Blair booth, my friend, former colleague and, I should say, current client John Jackson, Intermediary Marketing Manager, was leading with content—two-minute-ish video clips that are at the core of the firm’s Watch and learn alternatives campaign.

A single image doesn’t quite capture the effect of dynamic portfolio manager Brian Singer mid-delivery so I took a few rapid shots on my Android phone and let the Google+ Auto Awesome feature do the rest.

The result shows a slice of life in a fund company booth—Marketing does its job while the Sales guy does his.

Natty Marketer

After having been named the #1 fund family for 2013 performance in the annual Barron’s/Lipper Fund Family Ranking, Natixis took a victory lap by serving as principal sponsor of the conference. Natixis was everywhere, sponsoring the mobile app, the complimentary charging station, the beverage cups and the chewing gum.

We might have talked about all of that but when John Refford, Natixis Vice President, Strategic Marketing Technology, and I met up for the first time, I was drawn to his Pebble. The Pebble is a watch he helped fund on its first day on Kickstarter in 2012. John received it about a year later.

If wearable tech truly takes off in 2014, John has a headstart in familiarizing himself and thinking about its value for this space. Way to stay sharp, John.

Our Very Own Meme!

In opening the conference, Morningstar’s Kunal Kapoor, Head of Information Products and Client Solutions, promised an upbeat get-together. And, with the exception of some comments from selected portfolio managers, the conference delivered. At one point, Refford even invoked the term “funserv” in the #MICUS tweet stream.

Ironically (given the recent $50 billion outflows from PIMCO Total Return Fund), from the general session dais it was PIMCO’s Bill Gross who introduced levity. As Carlos Santana-esque music played, Gross took the stage wearing sunglasses and he even paused to check his cool factor out on the big screens.

It prompted some entertaining tweets, and finserv social media hit a new high when Michael Kitces posted this meme-worthy image. Animated gifs and selfies (see more below) followed. 

Bill Gross opened #MICUS general session showing off his optimistic outlook on @PIMCO - Cc @ReformedBroker pic.twitter.com/gAY8APeewk

— MichaelKitces (@MichaelKitces) June 19, 2014

Asset Managers And Social Media?

When meeting up with like-minded people in the Social Media Lounge in the middle of the Exhibit Hall, the conversation naturally turned to the state of social media in the asset management industry. These are my latest thoughts, colored by what I saw at the conference.

Kudos To Morningstar For Leading The Way

I sincerely believe that Morningstar itself, led by Leslie Marshall, is to be credited with helping accelerate the awareness of and adoption of social media in the investment industry.

The origin of Morningstar’s business was in the compilation, standardization and distribution of fund data and analysis—basically making it easier for investors to understand and follow funds. Then Morningstar was easily the first investment industry publisher to seize on using social platforms to advance the exchange of insights using the new content formats.

Onsite during the event, it’s not just Leslie who works the #MICUS hashtag. It’s also the business leaders whose full-on participation gives the social channel added editorial cachet. This assures that the stream isn’t overrun by tweets promoting booth numbers and giveaways, and that’s important.

The level of engagement this year rounded out the content planners’ on-stage personas while also demonstrating their interest in how the audience is reacting to the content, accessible via the Twitter backchannel.  

Scott Burns, director of manager research and apparent master of ceremonies, had sent more than 30 tweets—some his own thoughts but many retweets of others’—in the first hour of the event. Then he sent this tweet, which made me smile. It's pretty obvious he's taken on tweeting as part of his job, too.

Need to check out from tweeting for a bit. Need to get ready for my panel! I've got a job people! #MICUS

— Scott Burns (@MStarScottBurns) June 18, 2014

Just Half Of Presenting Asset Managers Have A Twitter Account…

By now, most of the largest asset management firms do something in social, even if it’s just a LinkedIn company page or YouTube channel with a video or two. But across-the-board adoption, best practices and accompanying gains in relevance and engagement? No, we’re not close yet.

Most of the presenters at the conference work for asset managers, and yet asset managers had little to say about their participation or their commentary on Twitter.

By my count, only half of the 27 presenters from asset management firms—and these firms were those selected by Morningstar analysts as being the most program-worthy in 2014, remember—hail from firms with Twitter accounts.

…And Most Of Those That Did Used Them For #MICUS Promotions

A few of the firms that have Twitter accounts used them and the #MICUS hashtag, but not always to the best effect.

If you’ve ever watched the tweet stream closely during an event, particularly during a general session event where most are focused on this one piece of content, it’s a bit jarring to see a promotional message (i.e., a notice about the swag available at a booth). Too many of those off-topic tweets were from firms that have much more to say but didn't.

Why were asset managers’ contributions to the conversation so marginalized?

For starters, let's consider why asset managers with Twitter accounts were mostly silent about what their presenters were sharing in Chicago.

Compliance issues would be my first guess. It does take some doing, including some of it in real-time, to use Twitter to share event content in addition to marketing updates. The possibility of being on the receiving end of tweets responding to the content has to be anticipated and planned for, too (even if the decision is to not respond). 

Below is a tweet that J.P. Morgan Funds had queued up and ready to go in support of its presenter. Note how the use of an image enables more to be said than can fit in 140 characters. There are ways to participate, as this example shows.

3 principles to guide absolute return #fixedincome strategy http://t.co/fXeiv2PPfa #MICUS @MorningstarInc pic.twitter.com/5pBPH91q5l

— J.P. Morgan Funds (@jpmorganfunds) June 19, 2014

A second factor might be the siloed manner in which event participation is divvied up as opposed to coordinated. Marketing’s role is usually limited to the booth, any related social (in the physical world) events, maybe pre-event emails. The content to be presented is the province of the Investments professionals, who may be oblivious to Marketing's interest in it.

A third consideration may have to do with “ownership," internal governance of the account and how narrow and/or deep the owners feel is appropriate to go with tweets emanating from a single, mostly B-to-B conference.  

At the same time, there are also opportunities for non-presenters to take part in content conversations. By tracking the #MICUS hashtag, firms both in the Exhibit Hall and outside it could have weighed in with their own content contributions.

This business may be too genteel to expect any bond managers to have had Twitter fun with Bill Gross' sunglasses-wearing but maybe there was an exhibitor that could have offered him branded croakies, if that's still a thing. The dreamer in me wishes that Gross, no stranger to Twitter, would have commented on some of the post-keynote tweets. But none of that happened this year.

Morningstar delivered a vibrant, highly tracked backchannel. We'll have to wait for next year (that's just something we do in Chicago) to see whether more asset managers will find a way to capitalize on the natural opportunities that accrue from taking part in relevant conversations.

I’m not saying anything that most marketers don’t understand and agree with. It’s just another measure of where we are, and the extent to which the benefits of being social have yet to be inculcated within the industry.

Meet Some Of The Tribe

Finally, much of the energy at any conference has to do with people coming together, to learn and exchange ideas but also to see one another, for the first time or again.

So, let me go personal here and say how much fun it was to meet up with people who are active in finserv topics online. Since I’ve mentioned everyone in this photo on the blog at one point or another, I thought you might want to see an update to their avatars. More? Blane's animated gif is here.

Shown in the snapshot with me are:

• Cathy Curtis, financial advisor—follow @cathycurtis, last mentioned on this RTB blog post
• Michael Kitces, financial planning thought leader—follow @MichaelKitces, last mentioned on this post
• Leslie Marshall, Morningstar—follow @LeslieAMarshall, see above and here
• John Refford, Natixis—follow @iamreff and see above
• Steph Sammons, WiredAdvisor—follow @WiredAdvisor and see this post
• Blane Warrene, QuonWarrene co-founder and TheDigitalFA editor at large—follow @blano and see this post. You might also be interested in Blane's coverage of the Morningstar Social Media Lounge
• Roger Wohlner, financial advisor—follow @rwohlner and see this post 

A Few Ways To ‘Listen’ To Advisors

Listening is one of the easiest things a marketer can do. And, the concept behind it is rock-solid, uncontestable—taking a break from your own messaging to pay attention to what your clients have to say can sharpen your ability to communicate relevantly.

© Eric Isselée - Fotolia.comBut how do you actually do it? That’s not been so easy or obvious, at least prior to the availability of social platforms where some people participate and all can listen.

The prospect of listening has been intriguing to me for several years. Before Web 2.0, I made a habit of checking the Registered Rep message boards (anybody?) and the now departed FundAlarm.com. Listening was the idea behind my 2009 development of AdvisorTweets.com, a Website that existed solely to publish the tweets of financial advisors (sold in July 2011 to Smarsh).

I’m still following lots of advisors and I manage to glean insights from what they’re saying. It’s a squishy undertaking, I’ll admit, and I’m always looking for more systematic ways to improve upon it.

Two Lists Do The Vetting

Good news: There have been two lists published in the last several weeks that make listening to advisors more easy and straightforward. Both lists are powered by BrightScope, whose business includes providing the first comprehensive and publicly available directory of financial advisors.

The list of the Top 100 Most Social Financial Advisors in the U.S. (2013), published on the BrightScope blog, is based on the BrightScope Social Influence Rank. The rank considers several individually weighted data points around an advisor’s Twitter profile and blog, such as followers, tweet activity, Moz Page authority, and more. BrightScope components also make up a small portion of the overall rank.

You’ll find a second list, the Top 50 Advisor Blogs And Bloggers, on Michael Kitces’ Nerd’s Eye View blog. Inclusion on this list is determined using Website metrics measured by Moz Analytics, including page authority, external links to the blog and total links.

I don’t get hung up on which individual ranked where; I’m just happy to see this surfacing of advisors. Their engagement numbers suggest that the advisors are posting updates that resonate with others, which makes them worth following for what they’re saying.

Now what? Here’s what I suggest.

Subscribe To The Blogs

Subscribe to the blogs. Follow the links to each blog named on Nerd’s Eye View, pick up the RSS feed, add it to Feedly and you now have a routine for monitoring what influential advisors are commenting about. The closer you pay attention, the better you’ll understand.

Two notes:

• If you’re not an RSS feed reader user, you might be interested in this explainer post I wrote for RIABiz recently.
• Yes, you could assign the subscription process to a minion but I wouldn’t. Invest the extra time to visit each advisor’s site yourself to take in the full context of the firm's business. It won’t kill you. Think of all the time you saved earlier by not listening.

Follow A Twitter List

Both lists also provide each advisor’s Twitter account name. We’re going to use those to create a third list, a Twitter list that will give you real-time monitoring capability. To make up for the snarky comment I made above about you not listening previously, I’ve made the Twitter list for you. It’s a compilation of all Twitter accounts on both lists.

A few observations on the Twitter accounts of these influential advisors:

• Don’t expect to see a high number of tweets or followers or even Twitter best practices across the board. At least one account on the BrightScope list still uses the default Twitter egg as his avatar.
• The tweets are not purely focused on what you’re going to care about. One of the accounts is @LinkedInNinja, influential for her LinkedIn advice to advisors but perhaps her content won’t be as valuable to you.
• Not all advisors are working as such, as in the case of SEI’s John Anderson (@SEIJohnA).

If you want to prune some names from the Twitter list I’ve created, use Tweetbe.at to copy my Twitter list and edit it.

In the 24-hour period between Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon, the influentials produced 436 tweets. They have a lot to say, which means that the tweets will scroll through your Twitter client at a fairly good clip.

An Aggregated View

As someone who regularly sends tweets that don't get the support of even one retweet, I know from experience that there can be gold in the orphan tweet. But as a listener, you can get ahead of the game even if you pay attention to just the content that advisors are swarming around.

That's why I was happy to get this compilation of names to finally be able to produce an aggregated view of the top content that influential advisors are sharing.

For this, we can use Tame. It will show you the top links shared by those on the Twitter list, the accounts that are being mentioned and—really important for those of you who are doing some mad improvising with your hashtags—hashtags that advisors actually use.

Above is a screenshot from yesterday, showing the highlights of those 436 tweets. If you expand the individual links, you can see what was said about the content in the underlying tweets. Using Tame your monitoring can be sporadic and yet you won't miss the highlights.

There must be hundreds of tools for industrial strength monitoring, but these lists give us a tuned look at what influential advisors, as vetted by the social data, are up to. If you don't already have a listening system in place, the combination of these lists and the capabilities of Tame is an easy-to-set-up and non-taxing way to start.

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?

The Less Hyped Twitter News: Now You Can Search Twitter Lists

Twitter is making the news this week with its planned changes to account profile pages.

But the focus of this post is a change that Twitter has made with little to no fanfare: the capability to search for Twitter lists.

Since I’ve been paying attention to Twitter and doing my part to introduce people to all that Twitter can lead to, there have been two recurring questions: 1. How do we get people to follow us? (And sometimes, who do we follow?) 2. How do we find relevant tweets? This change helps with both.

Twitter List Background

First, some background.

Whether you work for a firm with a chatty Twitter account or a firm interested just in what’s being said on Twitter but not maintaining a Twitter presence, Twitter lists can be useful. 

Things can look pretty messy on Twitter.com. Twitter lists are what enable an account to organize who it follows (example: Investment Managers on Twitter) or why it follows them (example: Marketing Technology).

Actually, you don’t even need to follow an account in order to add it to a Twitter list. This helps when you need to be stealth about who and what you're "listening" to.

Twitter lists can be either public or private. From what’s able to be observed (i.e., public lists) and from my experience, my sense is that asset management firms and Twitter lists could be better acquainted.

Here’s a look at some of the largest firms and their Twitter list membership and activity. Not only does @PIMCO have the most followers, it appears on the most public lists relative to others. And—to anticipate a question—the high list membership of Vanguard's advisor account (@Vanguard_FA) relative to the number of its followers suggests that Twitter-using advisors use Twitter lists.

iShares and Putnam are the only firms that have created and/or subscribed to public lists. It's possible they and others may be creating private lists. 

What To Learn From Twitter Lists

At the minimum, I recommend that you: 

• Track the number of Twitter lists that your account has been added to over time. The number of a Twitter account’s followers can be artificially inflated by advertising and other automated means. It’s an incomplete measure of the value of an account.

The Twitter list count is meaningful because a list creator needs to manually add each account to it. It’s a reflection of the resonance of your content. Also, inclusion on a Twitter list implies that your tweets have a better chance of being paid attention to.

• Note the names of the Twitter lists that your account appears on. This will show you how your content is being received. For example, it feels like all is in order when @RockTheBoatMKTG is added to an Investment Marketing Twitter list, and not so much when the account is added to a Boat Shipping list. 

To see the lists that others have added your account to, just go to your Twitter account Settings/Lists. The lists that your account has created and/or subscribed to is the default view, click on the Member of tab.

When your account is added to a list, it's reported through the Twitter Notifications tab.

For a total of the lists that your account is on, however, you’ll need to go to Twitonomy.com, the source of the data shown in the table above. 

• Create Twitter lists (private, probably) to isolate the individuals or topics you care most about. Tweets from your curated lists can then be monitored on Twitter.com or using third-party apps (HootSuite, Feedly, Flipboard, etc.)

Surfacing Relevant Accounts, Content

A few additional opportunities open up, now that Twitter lists can be searched. As an example, let’s say that your firm is positioning itself as a 401(k) thought leader.

A Twitter list search will expose you to who’s so focused on 401(k)s that they’ve created a list for the topic, and you’ll be able to track the tweets and accounts added to the list for your own content development inspiration.

If your firm is permitted by Compliance to follow others, Twitter list search will help vet which accounts and lists to subscribe to or follow. Your following activity will make the list creator and other accounts aware that you’re out there, and that your interests are aligned. This should lead to more followers for your account.

Greater visibility via the new search capability should also stimulate usage of Twitter lists. Hope so, I consider Twitter lists one of Twitter’s most awesome, configurable features. The absence of an easy way to search for them has been a drawback in others' adoption.

Where To Find Twitter List Search

Without any further ado, these screenshots show where to find the Twitter list search. These are from desktop Twitter. It's also possible to get to List search from the Twitter Android and iOS apps.

Start by entering your term in the Search box, which will produce timeline search results.

Click on Timelines in the left-hand column and you'll see two tabs displayed: One for Lists and one for Timelines. Lists is the default view. This shows just a partial view of the available 401k lists.

It’s not as intuitive as one might hope. For example, I expected to access list search via Twitter's Advanced Search but that’s not available. And, there’s no knowing the order that the lists are displayed in—it’s not by number of members, as you’ll see in the screenshot.

While we’re on the topic of Twitter search, did you know that you can also search within only the tweets of the people you follow (boxed on the screenshot above)? This can be quite helpful, too.

Fun With Mutual Fund, ETF Website Traffic Data

The next time you have an hour or two—sooner if you just can’t resist—check out the mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) sites in the investing and financial management categories of SimilarWeb.com, which reports on Website traffic. There’s a free version, which will keep you more than occupied, and a few paid subscription levels.

The individual profiles help with competitive intel about traffic levels and traffic sources, including search and social (organic and paid). Taken in aggregate, they provide a fascinating perspective on how sites are networked on the Web. Also, it’s motivating, isn’t it, to think of all of these investors in search of information?

About The Data

Like Comscore and Nielsen, among others, the data that SimilarWeb reports is based on panels of participants. SimilarWeb claims to be “several times bigger than traditional panels. This allows us to learn about every Website, big and small, and overcome the statistical errors that are typical of smaller panels.”

However, SimilarWeb’s data is of desktop traffic exclusively, and therefore not comprehensive. Mobile visits are an increasingly significant chunk of asset manager site traffic.

If you use just the free access of SimilarWeb, take note that sub-domains of Websites are reported individually. Because many asset managers rely on multiple sub-domains or maintain separate domains, the rankings will under-report the effectiveness of a competitor online. And, it can be tricky to assess traffic out of context.

For example, BlackRock.com looks to have doubled its traffic in 2013. Is that the result of a very good year or is there another explanation—e.g., a consolidation of domains, for example?

The paid version of SimilarWeb allows for the selection of either All domains and Main domain. In the comparisons I cite below, I looked at All domains.

There seems to be a lot of movement in the top 100 rankings. I reviewed the data as of November 30 and as of December 31, and the composition of the list changed more than just a few positions.

Here’s a random list of what I found interesting about traffic to investing sites in general and to the industry’s most-trafficked sites. I’ve restricted myself to quoting only data that can be viewed for free on the site.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

First, how about some respect for the granddaddy and still number 1 among investing Websites: YahooFinance.com?

SimilarWeb says the site attracted almost 2 billion visits in 2013, 150 million in December alone. Yahoo Finance stays on top the old-school way—63% of its traffic comes from links from other sites, towering over search, social or even direct as a traffic source.

No asset management site whose data I reviewed comes anywhere close to that, and yet referrals can be an enduring source of traffic.

The New And The Odd

Quite a few new and new business-model sites have broken into SimilarWeb’s top 100 in the U.S. investing category. For example, Twitter skeptics, note that StockTwits ranked #15 in December. Two-year-old Wealthfront, “the largest and fastest-growing SEC-registered, software-based financial advisor,” breaks in at #94 on the list.

Does anyone else find it odd that of all the possible investing sites out there (including yours) FINRA.org comes in at #42? CFAs make CFAInstitute.org crazy popular (#63).

2013 Traffic Stable Or Climbing

The syndication of content and the popularity of social platforms together call the question: What's the future of corporate domains? When I last wrote about this topic in 2009, I cited asset management Website data that pointed to declining usage and traffic.

But the 2013 12-month view of traffic—visits and not visitors—available from SimilarWeb suggests that traffic to most sites has been stable, if not climbing.

Fidelity And Vanguard

Traffic to Vanguard.com ranks it as the first mutual fund/ETF site in the U.S. investing category—separated by about 2 million visits from TRowePrice.com, the next highest mutual fund/ETF site on the list.

Fidelity’s nearly 16 million visits trump all, but is categorized in SimilarWeb’s “financial management” category.

Winning Search Traffic

It appears that even the best trafficked sites could do much better at winning search traffic. This is lamentable given all the content available on asset management sites (and tons in the making). Most sites fail to significantly benefit from search results for search terms other than derivatives of their brand names.

Here’s an exception worth noting: In 2013 about 4% of Fidelity’s enormous traffic came from the search term: 401k. Impressive—and, of course, it helps that 401k.com redirects to a Fidelity domain.

Also, a few ETF providers are gaining hearty traffic from searches of their ticker symbols, albeit another form of branded search. Promoting their longer ticker symbols is something mutual funds have not tended to do.

A Few Social Surprises

Speaking from experience, one could lose oneself in the detail that SimilarWeb provides about social traffic.

The paid version reports the total number of socially sourced visits for the year and by that measure, Vanguard was the most effective social asset manager in 2013. But BlackRock came on strong in the fourth quarter. As can be seen reported on the free SimilarWeb, 12% of BlackRock’s estimated 400,000 monthly visits is 50,000 visits. From Social alone.

There are a few surprises in the composition of the social traffic. For BlackRock, YouTube was the major contributor. For Fidelity, it was Facebook.

But Vanguard’s top social driver was Reddit aka "the front page of the Internet." Reddit has been a strong source of traffic to more consumer-type sites (although reportedly less so in 2013 than in 2012). Vanguard, and Fidelity to a lesser extent, got a sizable amount of referrals from the platform in 2013. Reddit traffic drove visits to PIMCO, iShares, even American Funds last year.

What SimilarWeb can't tell us is the quality of the traffic or how successful the firms were in converting it.  

What about Twitter and LinkedIn? According to the SimilarWeb data, Twitter is driving more traffic than LinkedIn but both are just runner-ups.

Here’s a kick: Yahoo Bookmarks drove more traffic to the asset managers in the top 100 list than LinkedIn. It's a good reminder that investors and others are using all manner of new and old tools to keep track of what's happening on your site.

Have fun checking all this out.

Note: Yesterday RIABiz named this blog one of the top 10 blogs (#9) in the advisory community. It’s a thrill to be included in such a prominent set of commentators, and it makes me want to try harder to deserve the honor. I recommend the full list of blogs—which also includes the 10 bloggers’ recommended blogs—to you.