Strategies to help advisers craft better, timelier tweets

With more financial advisers active on social media than ever before, now is the time to learn how to craft better tweets. Engaging your target audience via Twitter is not all that straightforward, after all. A recent study by BufferSocial, a tool geared toward boosting users' social media presence, analyzed data from 2 million users across the board and 4.8 million tweets to determine the best time to tweet and interact on the social media channel. Although it's a useful strategy, it turns out that timing isn't everything. But it does put the spotlight on what advisers should be doing, and that's taking advantage of their own analytics to maximize the impact of their social media efforts. "It's important to look at these numbers so you can track and measure the success of your posts," said Amy McIlwain, vice president of social and digital strategy at Moore Communications Group. "It'll give you further reach and give you the best return on your time investment in utilizing Twitter." As about 75% of the total number of advisers actively use social media for professional reasons, according to a Cogent Reports survey, Twitter usage has gone up from 14% in 2011 to 44% in May of this year. The Cambridge and InvestmentNews' 2014 Future of Advice study found 17% of the 552 advisers surveyed said they currently use Twitter.

Source: Cambridge/InvestmentNews

The BufferSocial study found that the best time to get clicks for your tweets was in the morning, while the most popular time to tweet was from noon to 1 p.m. The evening and night were best for interacting with other Twitter users. But those gauges may change based on each particular adviser and his or her intended audience. Advisers who want to take advantage of the best times to tweet need to know their specific clientele and who exactly they are targeting. Claire Akin, a social media consultant at FMG Suite, a social media platform for advisers, said that advisers should be cognizant of when different niches are active on Twitter. For example, an adviser focusing on clients going through a divorce should look to tweet on a late Tuesday night when they're likely to be overworked, exhausted and fighting, she said. But an adviser who works primarily with 401(k) rollovers should focus on tweeting during business hours in the middle of the week when the subject is usually trending. "Twitter is kind of like networking outside of the digital world — it's important to show up and be there, but it's going to be like small talk at a party," Ms. Akin said. "It's a casual place to connect with people, but then [advisers should] take it offline to push it forward." Cathy Curtis, a financial adviser with Curtis Financial Planning in Oakland, Calif., who has been using Twitter for seven years, said the platform has gotten noisy. So, she has a few strategies for optimizing her time on Twitter, including using lists that she curates of notable people in the industry, surfing the channel at least for a few minutes during breaks throughout her day and retweeting or favoriting posts and links she finds fascinating. Although she's noticed that she personally gets more engagement with her tweets during the morning, she said she would consider scheduling some content, such as links to blog posts, for other times of the day. Her only caveat is to take caution with scheduled tweets, as they can occur during a breaking news event that a large majority of Twitter users are commenting on, which would make any non-relevant content look silly. Regardless the strategies she implements or the engagement levels she's able to generate, Ms. Curtis said she thinks she'll always use Twitter. "I personally have benefitted so much from using Twitter," Ms. Curtis said. "Not only in getting new clients, but I've made friends, I've hired people — marketing people, branding people, writers — and I have gotten much more exposed as an adviser than I ever would have if I wasn't using Twitter."