Driving Engagement with Advisors on Twitter & LinkedIn

Key Takeaways

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Social Focus — Account Segmentation: LinkedIn and Twitter are the most active social networking platforms for asset management firms J.P. Morgan, PIMCO, BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity. Leveraging these profiles to reach advisors and their needs can be achieved through creating secondary pages that address content specifically for advisors. Vanguard does this on both Twitter and LinkedIn through creating Vanguard Financial Advising pages. Vanguard’s main accounts are used to promote and share the Financial Advising pages to advisors in their network. Similarly, Fidelity started using Reddit as a way to segment feedback and conversation with people generally interested in finance. 

Organic Content — Informative Content Buckets: Leverage different ways of sharing and providing content for advisors. The majority of advisors will be looking content that is research-based and tangible to use in their decision making. The top firms address this by creating research through seminars, white papers, blog articles, tools, newsletters and company updates. Content is presented in a variety of ways:

• Twitter: Top posters like Vanguard and Fidelity focus their efforts on link and image posts. On average they see higher engagement on posts with heavy text and video content in their Tweets. 
• LinkedIn: Vanguard and J.P. Morgan focus mainly on content as link posts and almost always see an increase in average engagement on link content up to +80%. While the Vanguard Advisor page has seen an increase of +26% engagement on posts sharing downloadable content.

Research — Topic & Group Focus: Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit all offer ways of managing and tracking engagement towards specific topics in the financial industry. More importantly, content ranking in different topics can be assessed to see what type of people are discussing different thoughts. This provides an opportunity to address questions advisors have before others do.

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The top Asset Management firms use a variety of social media platforms to tell their stories and reach a larger audience from Instagram to LinkedIn.

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Top firms are seeing higher followings consistently across Twitter and LinkedIn as opposed to Facebook and Instagram. Twitter and LinkedIn are more discussion-based platforms that professionals often use to gather information.

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In Q1 2021, Vanguard and PIMCO maintained the highest posting cadence on Twitter at 66 and 44 posts a month respectively.

The top content tailored to financial advisor audiences on Twitter are:

1. Tangible Tips. Providing clear tips that usually offer a finite amount of steps to help achieve a specific financial goal. These posts provide clear tips that usually offer a finite amount of steps to help achieve a specific financial goal. The main content is featured as a link to an original blog post. These posts can be experimented with by trying out different visual formatting with text and the use of emojis (example).
2. Question-Based Research. Starting the research with a question that is more relevant and relatable to advisor obstacles. Question-based research starts the post with a question that is more relevant and relatable to advisor obstacles. This gives the viewer a clear idea of the topic that will be addressed in the report, providing a reason to click-through and find out more (example). 
3. Tools. These posts supply tools for research and calculations when working on financial tasks and advising. Not only do these offer tangible resources for advisors to use, it gives them experience interacting with the firm’s content (example).
   

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Vanguard and Fidelity hold the highest engagement rates across their tweets at 4% and 0.89% respectively for Q1 2021.

How Vanguard uses Twitter.

Objective: While appealing to a mixture of audiences on their Twitter, 49% of their content is advisor-focused using terminology and trends that satisfy their interests. 
Vanguard uses a few tactics in their tweets including experimenting with text formatting to help convey main points as well as speaking directly to their audience with the use of “you” in their copy.

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Vanguard created a Financial Advisor account which receives much lower engagement on posts but repurposes content used across their social channels.

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Cash App was launched in ‘13 by Square Inc. to compete with PayPal’s mobile payment service, Venmo.

How Fidelity uses Twitter:

Objective: About 57% of the Tweets on Fidelity’s Twitter are research and trend focused that advisors take interest in. 

They present and segment their research through three main ways. They take a step-based approach that provides a finite amount of tips that advisors can expect. Fidelity also uses broad topics for research and publishes general content. Then they present research from the perspective of a professional on their team. 

Twitter also offers a preferred topic selection so users can choose what type of content to see from people outside of their network. 

A variety of finance topics are offered to monitor and track discussion in that segment. It can be accessed in Twitter’s navigation under “Topics”.

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In Q1 2021, PIMCO and Vanguard maintained the highest posting cadence on LinkedIn at 47 and 12 posts a month respectively.

The top content tailored to financial advisor audiences on LinkedIn are:

1. Seminars. Promoting and hosting events through LinkedIn accounts to discuss current events in the financial landscape. Use LinkedIn to create and promote highly detailed seminars and events that address topics financial advisors would be interested in learning about. They can be hosted in-app as ‘lives’ that can be saved and re-linked in a later post (example).‍
2. Research. Looking to important concepts in the financial field and sharing external links or in-house research to address these topics. Research reports provide the same clarity as seminars and events but in an easy to digest written format that advisors can quickly refer back to. These posts vary between link posts or image posts with the link in caption as pictured below that always link to the original blog post (example).‍
3. Newsletter. Promoting and sharing the ability to subscribe and learn from weekly newsletter hosted by respective firms. Create a weekly or daily newsletter that many people can reference and sign up for. These posts often link the subscription directly in the post with a strong cover image to advertise the newsletter and why advisors should subscribe (example). ‍
4. Donwloadables. Creating white paper content addressing financial topics and sharing it through LinkedIn enabling followers to download the reports. To provide even more value and in-depth analysis, firms can publish longer detailed white papers that advisors can download and keep on hand. These posts are often timely and relevant to the moment with coherent numbers and visualizations to provide value (example).‍
5. Updates. Updating audiences about general company news that could affect assets and public perception in a positive light. General company news is very important to share with advisors who are investing client money in their assets. These posts often boast about recognitions firms are receiving in the innovation and sustainability space that can help advisors feel confident about their decisions (example).
   

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Firms have built a strategy that addresses each content category. There are two different methods used to reach financial advisors in the LinkedIn space.

The first method involves creating sub-pages or “Showcase Pages” to discuss specific topics. The second method involves using the main LinkedIn page as the source of all the content.

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The first method enables the creation of a ‘Parent’ page in conjunction with ‘Showcase Pages’ that represent the company but only post about specific content.

How Vanguard uses the ‘Showcase Page’ Method:

Objective #1: Reach audience members looking for investment research specifically.

Vanguard uses a quick page description to describe their method and address what will be covered on their page. 57% of their posts are link posts to research, however Vanguard also experiments with videos to display graphs. 

Objective #2: To reach financial advisors looking for a range of content tailored to their profession and relationship with Vanguard.

The Financial Advisor Services page speaks directly to advisors by saying “Committed to doing the right thing for you and your clients”. The about section further explains their commitment to advisors and why Vanguard created this page. Top performing content explores the combination of downloadable content as link posts and research articles as link posts. 

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How J.P. Morgan uses the ‘Parent Page’ Method:

The second method maintains the ‘Parent’ company as the main source of content going out to an audience. While it is not as niche, it reaches a higher network of users that can use their content for financial advising. 

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In addition to firm-run LinkedIn pages, LinkedIn hosts finance groups that can be joined and monitored for major talking points and interests amongst advisors. 

Content in these pages discusses frustrations, questions and learnings that other advisors are seeking answers and conversations around.

Group members are active contributors adding several posts a day. Financial Advisor Magazine moderates a group which their editors manage to source content ideas and conversations.

In February 2021, Fidelity launched a Reddit community group to discuss any questions or feedback about investing and finance amongst their users. Currently, Fidelity is the only firm with a Reddit forum.

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Fidelity has about 12.4K members with an average of 145 comments on their feed a day. Topics, FAQs and tailored content can be managed and filtered easily for users.

This forum is for personal investors as well as advisors to leave feedback and learn from others.

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Apart from firms, Reddit has many forums discussing finance for advisors to collaborate and share information in. 

r/Finance has 491K members and has a weekly thread where users discuss their questions together.