In its 2010 installment of “What Advisors Do Online,” research firm kasina LLC reports that “the number of advisers using social media” rose to 77.5% of advisers surveyed, topping the 72.3% from last year.
For the survey kasina, in partnership with the Horsesmouth online adviser community, surveyed 536 financial advisers regarding their online behavior.
In an e-mail follow-up Eric Daugherty, the director of research and a principal at the firm, explained that different questions had been asked in this year's survey, meaning that there weren't necessarily directly comparable figures for all the questions from last year.
For example, I asked what this year's results showed compared to the
2009 finding that Morningstar Inc. had the most popular website among advisers (nine percent of the 548 advisers surveyed last year selected it as their favorite with a fairly distant second place going to Yahoo! Finance and Bloomberg, which tied at three percent of advisers).
Mr. Daugherty provided a daily usage metric as the closest comparable match, specifically, “the financial industry website used daily the most”: Yahoo! Finance with 34.5% of advisers reporting that they “used this daily” compared to the website of Morningstar at 17.7%.
One audience kasina is targeting with the survey results is asset managers, that group tends to need help better understanding adviser preferences.
One suggestion: Asset managers should reduce the amount of e-mail they send to advisers. That's based on the finding that among “high-value advisers” (those defined by kasina as being in the top 10% of assets under management, averaging at least $286 million), 55.4% responded that “asset managers sent them too much e-mail.”
Also, while the quality of a wholesaler's printed literature might have been seen as critically important to advisers in the past, these days their online menu is important too.
Kasina found in its survey that “more than 71% of advisers say the quality of the firm's online capabilities impacts their use of the firm's products.”
Other interesting online tidbits about “high-value advisers” include that they spend on average an hour more online each week (a total of 14.4 hours) than their lower AUM counterparts.
In addition, 62% of high-value advisers visit asset manager sites for news and commentary as “compared to 46.3% of all other advisers.” And 85% of advisers report visiting asset manager sites “at least occasionally.”
Among other, more general takeaways, “more than 53% of advisers use mobile devices to access work-related content other than e-mail.”
The report can be purchased for $8,500, for more information visit
kasina online.
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