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:
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.
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.
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.
In Q1 2021, Vanguard and PIMCO maintained the highest posting cadence on Twitter at 66 and 44 posts a month respectively.
Vanguard and Fidelity hold the highest engagement rates across their tweets at 4% and 0.89% respectively for Q1 2021.
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.
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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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”.
In Q1 2021, PIMCO and Vanguard maintained the highest posting cadence on LinkedIn at 47 and 12 posts a month respectively.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.