Twitter: An Early Look At What’s Changed

Twitter, the asset management industry’s favorite social network, made some sweeping changes today. While you can count on all of the usual suspect sites (and I say that with gratitude) to provide comprehensive coverage and analysis, I’ll weigh in here with a few comments for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers.

You could watch the video, too, although I got very little out of it besides a touch of vertigo.

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U.S. Asset Managers Not Part Of Global Slowdown In Financial Services Tweeting

"90% of Twitter accounts in financial services are inactive"

Whoa. I read a Visible Banking blog post with that headline yesterday and then tweeted it. But I couldn’t shake the thought—seriously, all this work to get Twitter accounts up and running and then you’re going to let the opportunity go stagnant by not tweeting in a month or more? That was a dreary thought on what was already a dreary October day in Chicago.

But, no, I'm happy to say that’s not the case with the much smaller set of U.S.-based investment managers we track.

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Twitter’s New Image Gallery: A Surprise…And Maybe An Opportunity?

One of the tricky things about participating in social networks is that you have no idea what the network is planning to do with your data next.

We’ve seen that with Facebook’s Beacon initiative which involved Facebook publishing third-party site activity (e.g., products and services bought on other sites) to members’ Facebook profiles, among other examples. And, LinkedIn got busted this summer when it included LinkedIn members’ names and photos in third-party ads, a practice since reversed.

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A PIMCO Tweet Anticipated Today’s WSJ Report

My feed reader today yielded a small but illustrative example of 1)how a Twitter presence can help an asset manager “front-run” a news organization and 2)how tweets, as short as they are, do command attention and can be memorable.

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Do Investors Have Different Expectations Of Mutual Fund And ETF Firms On Twitter?

Do retail investors think of Twitter and interact with mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Twitter accounts in a way that’s different from how they use Twitter to interact with other brands?

I first wondered this last year when there was no sign that investors (or asset managers) took to Twitter to explain what was going on during the May 6 flash crash. That surprised me, as Twitter has established itself as a channel for real-time news and information, especially during crises when information is streaming in from multiple sources.

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