Can Advisors Twitter Themselves to Fame and Fortune?

There is no doubt Twitter has become something of a social phenomenon. I had initially been skeptical of Twitter, thinking it was mostly a vaste wasteland for people who didn't have enough to say to actually blog (not that that ever kept me from blogging, by the way). But, what got me to take a second look was an article in the San Jose Mercury that posited that Twitter might one day overtake Google because of the profound capabilities of "real time" search (unlike Google's search results which might be, say, several hours old), even though how this would eventually translate into revenue was still a bit murky. I became particularly interested in how financial advisors could use Twitter to promote themselves, build their personal brand, network with other professionals, and generally communicate with clients. Now, recently, enough friends and colleagues have also started to Twitter and now look to me for a bit of advice, that I thought it was time for a blog summary (linked to from my Twitter profile, of course, updates to which appear in the column to the right).

For those of you who are total newbies, Twitter is a rapidly growing social media platform(?) that some people call micro-blogging, primarily because your "posts" are limited to the somewhat arbitrarily chosen number of 140 characters. You are supposed to share your activities, thoughts, inspirations and more with your "followers" as frequently as possible, as well as to interact with them in a casual, open forum.

There are enough great "How to Get Started" tutorials for Twitter, I won't bore you with the mechanics. Instead I'll try to cut through all the hype and give you some of the reality of what to expect from Twitter, the good and the bad, particularly if you are a financial professional trying to grow your business and reach out to a community.

Advantages:

• Twitter is a great way to promote yourself to a large number of people, provided, however, you take the approach that you probably would at an after hours cocktail party. You wouldn't keep soliciting clients or talking business at a party, and neither would you on Twitter, but eventually, one thing leads to another, and friends introduce friends, and Bingo!
• Twitter personas therefore have to be more casual and advisors can begin to share their outside interests easily, whether it's their family, sports, hobbies, etc. Advisors tend to connect with clients that are like themselves, so this is perhaps a good way to start to connect with people that can lead people to you for professional services.
• Twitter is certainly a great way to communicate with existing clients, prospects, friends, etc. because it's less formal and intrusive than even email, and it's so easy to reference articles, videos, whatever you want to share, that may otherwise be difficult to blast out widely.
• Twitter can also be a great source of inspiration and insight (assuming you don't set your expectations too high). Just search on any topic you have in mind, and you can find like-minded folks who have undoubtedly walked down the path you are heading already. In fact, there's probably no better way to get started than just "following" other advisors and see what they do, what they are thinking about, and what you can learn from them on any aspect of the business.
• In the advisory business, even at major firms, it can be pretty lonely sometimes. Twitter can help grow a great community and maybe a sense of comraderie that can be fun, informative and at times lucrative with virtually no effort.

Disadvantages:

• Compliance can definately be a problem, or at least a concern that needs to be managed. If you work for a major firm, it's unlikely that you'll be allowed to twitter. One advisor I follow just goes ahead anyway and doesn't disclose his firm suspecting they would shut him down. If you are independent or in a small firm and you don't do anything risky or overt, you should be fine. Just remember anything you write can come back to haunt you.
• Twitter can be a serious time sink. Reading a mountain of tweets from your rapidly growing network can be distracting, if not addictive. So be careful. Don't use this to replace any of your other marketing activities or keep you from real work. Just use the right Twitter tools to get organized and efficient to get the most out of it.
• There are many, many people with thousands or tens of thousands of followers. Some will follow you, some you may follow back. You have to decide what your protocol is and how much of a Twitter snob you will be. It's nice to think your follow count is growing, but to what end? You don't know who is really reading your posts. For me, it's kind of like real life. I've got my small community of like-minded or shared interest groups (maybe disjoint groups for each of three or four particular interests) and I love to interact with them professionally or socially. Everyone else is just walking by me in the mall and they don't really care what my t-shirt says that day.

 A bit about the technology:

• Twitter performance is terrible, making it almost unusable during peak hours. If the servers get overloaded you get a picture of a bunch of birds trying to lift a whale out of the water (a "fail whale"). A lot of times the pages don't format fully. Pray that these guys get bought by Google or start turning major revenue before they get fully overwhelmed.
• You can't use twitter.com for very long because its simple U/I doesn't allow you to get organized and focus on your main network (and filter all the trash you end up following along the way). You should quickly use tweetdeck, tweetvisor (which shows promise along with many bugs), or some equivalent. You can also post from one of many sites that shorten URLs to get your character count down, like bit.ly.
• Start out by going to wefollow.com to register your interests or affilliations so people can find you. Maybe you are a #CFP, or #financialadvisor. You can also find others to follow by the tags already created there. You can also find stock tweets/discussions by searching on a ticker symbol preceded by "$", like $MSFT.
• As long as we're all interacting socially and sharing bits about ourselves, make sure to drop a few of your favorite songs out there to help people to get to know you better, which you can do from blip.fm.

Finally, it would be a serious injustice not to point you to the twitterers I have admired and learned from, especially if you have an interest in financial stuff, even just your own. So if you haven't started Twittering yet, open an account and #follow these advisors or financial professionals: @KristenLuke, @jeffrosecfp, @billwinterberg, @jdbuerger, @agluck, @financialcents, @susanweiner, and probably many more I've forgotten but you'll find quickly enough. Kristen Luke and Andy Gluck particularly have great resources and tips for advisors looking to make it in the Twitter/social media world, including navigating compliance issues, and I highly recommend you check out their contributions on this topic as well. @Lawain is currently running a social media bootcamp for advisors, and had @RussThornton on a podcast today regarding social media in his practice (replays available). If you do use Twitter, @ddjanowski is looking to interview advisors for an upcoming article about how they use Twitter in their practices.

Comments

[Pat Allen]

Great article, Gary.

I don't know if you're aware but just today Lawain McNeil from AdvisorBlogger.com kicked off a Social Media Bootcamp for advisors with another online financial advisor rockstar Russ Thornton from Thornton Wealth Management (ThorntonWealth.com). I'd add both of these gentlemen to your list above.

The social media bootcamp consists of hour-long audio presentations, which are held live and can be downloaded later as podcasts. I'm listening to it now at http://bit.ly/zvP0i

I'm interested in financial advisor adoption of social media by virtue of my job as digital marketing strategy consultant to asset managers. They've been just a little slower in adopting Twitter, etc. but I have no doubt they will eventually. See you online!

[Scott Amyx]

Thanks Pat. Yes, I did see Lawain's announcement for his boot camp but was unable to attend. I will look forward to the replay. And you are right, he and Russ are excellent additional resources on social media. Consider them added. -- GK