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.

The Next Wave: Asset Manager Executives Take To Twitter

When Nuveen joined Twitter last week (@NuveenInv), it became one of a dozen asset management firms that maintain at least one account for an individual executive in addition to a corporate account.

The Demand

If you work for a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) company and your job includes social media, this development is no surprise to you. From what I hear, thought leaders are chomping at the bit to “get out on Twitter” and are attempting to enlist the help of any random body in Marketing to get it done. Their gravitas notwithstanding, thought leaders have to wait in the Legal/Compliance/IT queue for social media enablement and archiving.

On Twitter, a few users are even asking for accounts to be created for some of the industry’s bigger names. DoubleLine Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer Jeffrey Gundlach is at the top of that list, based on my unscientific monitoring. Gundlach also has the unique distinction in this space for having inspired a fake Twitter account: @fauxGundlach. Until an official @Gundlach account surfaces, users will have to be content using the #Gundlach hashtag.

A Twitter List

Here’s a list of the mutual fund and ETF executive Twitter accounts that I know of. (If I’ve missed any, please advise below.) All of the names below have been added to a new Rock The Boat Marketing InvestmentMngrs_Execs Twitter list. In addition, I’m including them on the InvestmentManagers Twitter list that I maintain, for the broadest way to follow asset managers’ presence on Twitter. 

By my count, Invesco has the most individual accounts, followed by First Trust (we Illinoisans love us some Twitter!). Even PIMCO, where the industry’s most prominent individuals (Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian) post using @PIMCO, has an individual account.

Note that the list includes investment strategists, economists, a product strategist, retirement specialists and just two CEOs. Seventeen names representing a $15 trillion industry? There's a lot of room for growth here, and I believe this is the next wave of what firms will be doing on Twitter—introducing many more voices. (And, recall that Putnam has said that its wholesalers are heading to Twitter next.)

The Advantages

There are quite a few advantages to launching an individual account. 

• It's straightforward. While a corporate Twitter account typically precedes the launch of an individual account, it’s not always in that order. A few firms have found it easier to launch an individual account first. 

“What would we tweet about?” and “Who would do it?” are two show-stopping questions easily answered when a thought leader account is envisioned. 

• Additional followers. People will follow investment strategist accounts who won’t follow a corporate account. Savvy Twitter users, including most financial advisors, know that corporate accounts come with a lot of promotional and/or non-relevant updates. An individual account can elevate brand awareness in its own way. Be aware, though, that Marketing can expect some interesting times as you try to sort it all out. 

Here’s a screenshot of the limited (12%) overlap between the First Trust corporate account (with many fewer followers) and the @wesbury account of Chief Economist Brian Wesbury. People who follow Wesbury get an earful of all kinds of stuff, some on-brand and some—I’m guessing here—far afield. (See a related post from May 2012: 3 Ways Asset Manager Tweeting Is Evolving.) 

• Specialization. A specialized account has extra appeal for those who focus on Twitter. This is just another instance where total follower counts mean little. Example: If I were a reporter following the retirement business or a financial advisor focused on it, Invesco’s Tom Rowley account would be a must-follow.

• Personality and tone. Some corporate Twitter accounts do a terrific job with brand voice and personality but it can be a struggle. By contrast, an individual account has just one, authentic personality to think about. Personal accounts attract more interest and engagement. 

The catch for asset managers: Even more so than for corporate accounts, people are going to talk to individuals and they are going to want to hear back, too. The individual who has authority to post but not re-tweet or reply has his or her hands tied in a way that will limit the success of a Twitter strategy (the non-responsive @PIMCO account being the exception).

The Twitter platform is every bit as able as CNBC to host an exchange between investment or product strategists. Why couldn't this happen?

The unleashing of egos on public platforms without a referee is not for the feint of heart, by the way, as hinted by this exchange yesterday between Virtus' Joe Terranova and someone complaining about a missed forecast. 

@Aftermath_2012 think I did better than that w my mea culpa on Gold not pulling back another 20% by the end of the year

— Joe Terranova (@terranovajoe) August 12, 2013

Who’s Doing The Promotion?

I know of other employees of asset management firms who are on Twitter. They’re not in spokesperson or high visibility positions, however. And, their Twitter bios either omit mention of their employer or explicitly state that they speak for themselves only. If you’re on Twitter but want to stay under the radar, rest assured that I will keep it to myself until you change your status.

The bios of the accounts on the list above expressly mention their official roles, and the tweets have to do with their roles. But if they're not supposed to be a secret, I wonder why these have such low visibility. Few of these accounts are mentioned either in the account bios or on the Twitter backgrounds of the corporate page. There's practically no embrace of them (e.g., a display of recent tweets) on the firms' Websites.

An exception: Check out the prominence Oppenheimer gives its three Twitter account feeds at the bottom of the home page of its site. 

Do corporate entity issues prevent the accounts of some of these firms from acknowledging the accounts of an employee affiliated with a different subsidiary? I suppose that could be what it is.

But, if it's an oversight this is easily addressed. Just as a firm can’t afford to have individuals taking to Twitter without jumping through the required hoops, neither will a firm want to see what happens when Twitter account promotion is left to an individual’s devices. Thought leaders can be pretty creative, remember.

My recommendation: Make sure your individual Twitter account implementation plan considers how to give it presence and ongoing marketing attention. 

Which mutual fund or ETF executives would you expect to see soon on Twitter? 

Where Are Advisors Engaging Today? Where Will They Engage Tomorrow?

If you build it, will they come? And by that I mean to ask: If your asset management firm follows Putnam Investments in building out a capability to empower your Sales team on LinkedIn (see last week’s post), will there be sufficient activity to justify the effort? 

An abundance of research, including a study published by LinkedIn and FTI Consulting last year, suggests that LinkedIn is financial advisors’ favorite social platform for business and especially for "cascading thought leadership." And, where advisors go, asset managers and their wholesalers eventually find a way to follow. The potential to use LinkedIn as a means of calling advisors’ attention to mutual fund and ETF provider content and even messaging has near irresistible appeal. Heck, LinkedIn has promise if only for reaching advisors in listen-only mode. 

But in order for actual interaction—in the form of content reactions and sharing—to occur on LinkedIn (beyond the to-be-expected boost in Website traffic), systems and procedures must be in place. Asset managers’ and financial advisors’ respective Compliance staffs must be certain that communications are happening within allowable and archive-able parameters on a social platform they have no direct control over.

The significant investment (team focus, time and hard dollars) required begs a few questions, which I’ve asked of RegEd Senior Vice President of Customer Communications Blane Warrene. Blane's comments below provide a point-in-time report of the extent of advisor social engagement as of July 2013. As he makes clear, this is a dynamic topic.

Blane WarrenePreviously, as founder of the social media archiving firm Arkovi, Blane had provided a glimpse of actual advisor social media activity by publishing a few infographics summarizing what its advisors were archiving. 

Arkovi has since been acquired by RegEd and the database is one of many archiving systems out there. But what advisors are archiving to RegEd may be generally representative of overall advisor activity. 

Blane, what does your archiving data tell us about how advisors are using LinkedIn? 

Warrene: Part of the "lean toward" LinkedIn suggests an initial comfort level. LinkedIn is viewed as a business and networking tool and, moreover, it was not considered social media before the phrase took new flight in 2008-2009. LinkedIn launched in 2004. So, there is a comfort that LinkedIn is understood and folks who may feel less savvy on other social platforms are confident they "get it" with LinkedIn.

From 2010 to 2012 advisors were making connections and some profile optimizations. In part due to the shifting feature set of LinkedIn and in part to the swell of commentary on the application of LinkedIn for business, in 2013 we see significant upticks in profile updates (embedded files one of those new features, as well as expanded data points, like Projects and Publications among others). 

Status updates have trended up quite a bit as folks are simply using their stream more regularly and sharing or creating content. 

Specific upticks:

• In 2011 LinkedIn accounted for 3% of volume in our archives, in 2012 it was 20% and now YTD in 2013 it’s 25%.
• The number of profile changes has doubled year over year.
• Skills use exploded as soon as the new features emerged (the nudge that LinkedIn provides when visiting certainly encouraged that.)
• Top two other areas of profile changes are Positions (not just job changes but edits to the profiles—i.e., adding new capabilities like slide shows and videos) and Education (extremely helpful for advisors seeking to tap their alumni connections network). 

According to the FTI Consulting/LinkedIn work, half of advisors “would choose LinkedIn over Facebook, Twitter or Google+ to cascade thought leadership if policies were not an obstacle, but only one in ­five has been able to do so.”

What’s the issue here? Are there levels of permissions granted by the broker-dealers, wirehouses, etc.—i.e., is it one thing to create a profile and another thing (more complicated to review and/or archive, hence available to fewer advisors?) to start interacting with LinkedIn updates?

Warrene: There are no issues with advisors seeing updates. Once a LinkedIn profile is approved (easiest) then all is good. Firms just need to monitor and retain the activity such as status updates and profile changes. 

At the wirehouse and broker-dealer level, we do see policy constraints around genuine engagement and content creation and this will stifle legitimacy in the long run (i.e., when a firm enables social and then allows its workforce to use only content the firm creates and distributes, without narrative or editorial freedom).

I understand the business reasons that might be influencing policies governing engagement but are there archiving technology hurdles, as well?

Warrene: LinkedIn does have a more layered approach with their API from a technical perspective—and many data points a financial advisor or a firm would want for discovery, compliance and reporting are quite inaccessible. Connections data is one example where, with more recent moves by LinkedIn, a popular tool [Job Change Notifier, which advisors relied upon to surface 401(k) rollover opportunities] is now shutting down. [See this post for background on new restrictions on LinkedIn's API.]

However, the data needed specifically for compliance is largely present, but an advisor or a firm will need to use a technology solution to get it, which pushes the burden of jumping through hoops for the data to the provider. 

One of the technology challenges of social media activity (and really, any of the modern digital actions that are not driven through a singular channel—i.e., Website or email communications) is that you have to juggle numerous mediums (audio, video, imagery, text et al) and multiple channels (first screen, second screen and now third screen—as in computer, tablet and smartphone.) This all has to be supported, captured and then normalized in a way any daily user can consume and interact with it.

No small effort. I've spent years immersed in the integrations, data and finding ways to keep this as simple as possible—and I keep learning something new daily (seriously). 

The other technical challenge is the pace. We track and adjust our solution weekly and monthly to pace the shifts on social platforms.  

For a forward look, as APIs mature some with large development communities it becomes much easier to resolve the compliance and data management challenges. Contrary to some conventional wisdom, the Twitter API is one of the best to work with. I would set Google as second (including YouTube) and Facebook right after. We get expansive data footprints from those tools. 

What kinds of advisor engagement do you see on the other top social networks?

Warrene: Today we see deeper engagement than on LinkedIn. 

• For Facebook, our latest stats show one-third of Facebook archive data is Facebook Mail—people want to communicate and engage. Likewise, 25% of Facebook archived data is comments, a nice uptick in engagement with our customers. 
• One-quarter of Twitter archive data is Mentions of our users and RTs of their content—a nice engagement ratio off the total.
• With Google+, also an approximate one-quarter of Plus archive data is engagement we track—+1s and Reshares of posts. Now that we've just added support for Business Pages (on July 8) we will see that number tail up. 
• As you might expect, photos continue to surge up on Facebook and now Google+ as it is just too easy to share photos there.

Last question for you, Blane. There’s at least one more barrier keeping this business—asset managers and financial advisors included—from engaging with the full capabilities of LinkedIn: Recommendations and endorsements. Both FINRA and the SEC explicitly prohibit testimonials, which is lamentable given that recommendations are key to most business-to-business connections. Any insights from your archive on those?

Warrene: Endorsements are such a murky territory—a client can endorse an advisor verbally or in writing (of their own accord) without issue. It is how business is done. It is simply the endorsement being visible to a wide, uncontrolled group that converts it into an advertisement. Those are clearly prohibited. 

However, every day I see firms that prohibit or limit social and yet their producers and advisors allow skills endorsements on their LinkedIn profiles. The murky part is that there is not a narrative endorsement—in essence it is a "like" on the advisor, suggesting he or she is good at that skill (i.e., budget planning, financial planning, public speaking...whatever).

Several advisors who are independent RIAs have said to me, “We won't turn ours off until our wirehouse competitor down the street turns theirs off." A reasonable statement. 

We urge folks to disable Recommendations on LinkedIn and for now, without further guidance, to turn off the Skills endorsements. Connections can still endorse—it just does not show who endorsed your skills. That said, we currently have 22,000 recommendations in our archives so not everyone agrees with our guidance. ;-) 

Affirmed: Social Media Now Part Of Advisors', Professional Investors' Workdays

I actually remember where I was when the results of the first American Century survey of financial professionals’ use of social media were released four years ago.

I’d been following financial advisors on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and their blogs as just another one of my unstructured online diversions. I didn't know where it was going. To me the publication of the survey was a profound development: By going so far as to commission a study, an asset manager was acknowledging social media as a relevant activity for advisors.

In that 2010 survey, only 26% of respondents ranked social media as having value to their business. Nearly one-fourth said they didn’t want to receive information via social media. Of those who used social media for business purposes, almost one-fifth (19%) did so daily, but 49% said they used social media less than once per week.

Fast forward four years, and an Ignites reporter and I were chuckling yesterday as we were reviewing American Century’s fourth annual survey results.

Uh, what’s the news in the latest findings?

In the years between American Century’s first and fourth survey—to the probable relief of both financial advisors and asset managers—things have stabilized sufficiently that there is no obvious, dramatic news. Nine out of 10 advisors now have a social media account and the evidence is mounting that they find value in social activities. Twitter usage has climbed since the last survey. Oh and Instagram makes its first appearance in the results.

This year’s study documents what has been a gradual embrace and now reliance on the content that can be found on social networks.

Reliance? That’s how I interpret the increase in advisors using social media more than once a week—61% report using social media at least once a week, 39% several times a week and 10% multiple times a day (a datapoint that’s down from 16% in 2012). 

This suggests that there is consistent value in the content that’s being exchanged. Mining social networks for content worth reading and worth sharing has become part of many advisors’ workday routines. It’s a win-win-win, for the advisors, for the content creator (including participating asset managers who recognize the opportunity) and for the networks themselves.

A Direct Channel To Professional Investors

News last week produced another concrete example of why it’s good to share via Twitter, specifically. Bloomberg announced that it would incorporate a curated list of Twitter accounts into its data service. 

From the press release: “Bloomberg Professional service subscribers can now monitor and analyze real-time Twitter updates issued by corporations, executives, government officials, economists, commentators, media outlets and other voices that can influence the financial markets. By incorporating live Twitter feeds directly into its financial information platform, Bloomberg integrates social media content with users’ existing investment workflow so market participants avoid the disruption caused by monitoring separate systems for different types of market-moving information.”

Bloomberg isn’t releasing the list of people and companies that they make available on the terminals, but some subscribers have uploaded some names. When I didn’t see any investment managers on the lists of names being published, I emailed Bloomberg and attached the @RockTheBoatMKTG Twitter list of Investment managers to see if they would comment about whether any investment managers were on the list of "voices that can influence the financial markets." 

After a little email back and forth, here was the response:  “Yes, Bloomberg follows select companies, including investment managers.” 

For those of you with Twitter accounts, this integration represents a new channel. How else would your communications regularly stream to Bloomberg terminals? Never before have you had such access to professional investors. 

(Do you have a work buddy with access to a Bloomberg terminal? You might want to confirm your firm’s inclusion. Subscribers can go to {TWTR<GO>} and select option 8 "People" to query people whose tweets can be followed or searched.) 

Again, back to the official statement: “Bloomberg classifies tweets by company, asset class, person and topic, making it easy for institutional investors, traders, corporate executives and government agencies to track updates related to a specific industry or market, their portfolio holdings or an online personality.” 

This Is What's New

Taken together, the 2013 American Century research and the Bloomberg integration are proof that Twitter content (and content shared on other networks in the case of advisors) has become a part of systematic information-gathering. This is what’s being affirmed in 2013.

Decision-makers that you and your firm care about are showing that they're serious about what can be learned via social media. If you’ve approached your social posts in a half-hearted way (come on, we can do better than tweeting the availability of updated fund profiles) and/or posted on an occasional schedule, or if you have yet to “join the conversation,” it's time for you to get serious, too.

Minutes after I published this post Tuesday morning, I came across (via Twitter, naturally) two related posts that I recommend to you: 

• Bloomberg Eliminates Buy-Side’s Barrier to Twitter is Q4's hands-on look at the Twitter integration.
• New SEC Social Media Policy Makes Twitter The New Center Of Financial News is an overview of the SEC policy change announced last week as well as the Bloomberg announcement. It's written by influential financial planner Michael Kitces.