Twitter for Financial Advisors: A Social Media Marketing How-To Guide

With about 23% of U.S. adults using twitter, it definitely isn’t as widely used as Facebook, where 70% of U.S. adults have an active account. Nevertheless, it’s still an important and popular platform, especially for financial advisors. That’s because the people who are there are extremely engaged and come with a huge appetite for relevant information and insights into current events, including financial markets.

This is a great opportunity for financial advisors to position themselves as thought leaders and trusted sources of educational content. To do that, start with this quick guide on using Twitter for financial advisors.

Who Is the Target Audience on Twitter for Financial Advisors?

Twitter users are more likely to have a college degree and generally earn more than the median income. One 2018 analysis found that 53% of people earning $100,000 or more are on Twitter. Likewise, about half of adults earning $80,000 on $100,000 are on the platform. But keep in mind that users skew younger than Facebook and some other platforms. About 73% of users are under 50. 

As a financial advisor, that makes this a great platform to target early- to mid-career adults in higher income brackets. So think about what kind of financial concerns and goals people at that stage of life and income are likely to have when you’re planning out the topics you’ll post about on Twitter. 

What Should You Post About?

69% of Twitter users report getting their news on the site and 57% say the platform increases their understanding of current events. While FINRA’s fair and balanced communication rules prevent you from making predictions or dishing out investment recommendations, Twitter is still a great place to showcase your financial knowledge and engage with users who crave content that makes them feel like they’ve learned something.

Whatever content strategy you adopt, try to make it educational or informative and tailor your tweets to current events as much as possible. Talk about best practices for investing or wealth management in current market conditions or given new policy changes (without giving specific investment or financial product recommendations). 

If you don’t have the time to come up with a unique insight for every trending event, you should at least be retweeting or commenting on other tweets from relevant accounts in the finance niche. 

How to Set the Optimal Posting Schedule

The general guideline is to post between two-five times per day on Twitter. It’s one of the most high-frequency social media platforms you will encounter and accounts that tweet more get more engagement. That combined with the fact that its users generally want to see content relevant to current events make it harder to generate engagement with tweets scheduled too far ahead of time. 

In terms of when to post, aim for the times of day when most working professionals take breaks. The site is most active on weekdays during the following timeframes:

• 8:00 A.M to 10:00 A.M
• 12:00 P.M. to 3:00 P.M.
• 6:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M.

With a mix of automated scheduling tools and staff delegation, you can keep your Twitter account active, engaging, and relevant even though it might require a bit more active management than other platforms.

How to Grow an Audience on Twitter

Like Facebook, Twitter has disappointingly low organic outreach rates. With so many people tweeting so often, the average user’s twitter feed is a constant flood of new tweets that will quickly bury your latest tweet at the bottom. That’s part of the reason you need to post more often. 

Even so, there are still ways to reach your audience on this noisy platform. Here are some of the best practices for growing a following on Twitter:

• Comment and retweet often. To start, you can stick to just two scheduled tweets per day and then focus the rest of your energy on retweeting or commenting on posts from high profile users in the finance space. Engaging with other finance industry professionals who already have a large following is one of the most effective ways to get you in front of the audience you’re trying to reach. 
• Participate in Twitter chats. One of the sites newer features, Twitter chats are recurring scheduled events. Twitter users typically host chats on a general topic (designated by a hashtag) with each scheduled event focusing on specific sub-topic. Find some finance-related chats that you can participate in. Doing so is one of the best ways to engage with new users and increase your following. Once you have a healthy following of your own, you can host your own chats.
• Use community hashtags. While overloading a tweet with hashtags can be off-putting, you should use one or two relevant hashtags. Some popular options that could be relevant to you include #perosnalfinance, #financialplanning, #financialnews, and #financialliteracy. Twitter users search by hashtags when they’re looking for posts about these topics so it can increase your odds of popping up in those searches. 
• Track hashtags. Twitter lets you track those same hashtags so you can stay plugged into the conversations that are happening around them. Use that to shape your posts so that you’re always tweeting something relevant to the conversations that are happening around those topics at the moment.
• Post Twitter threads. One of the best ways to position yourself as a thought leader is to dive into the weeds on a topic or break down a complex concept into easy-to-understand explanations. To do that, post a thread (a series of connected tweets) on a certain topic. Threads are popular among users who want to learn something and the format breaks the topic down into bite-sized chunks that are easier for users to engage with. Do this once or twice a month to establish yourself as a regular source of education and discussion.

If a lot of these tips seem time-consuming, it’s because they often are. To avoid taking time away from important work, you would ideally delegate a lot of this leg work to a staff member so that all you have to do is quickly review posts and comments for compliance. If you don’t have the staff for that, you might do better sticking with less demanding platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn.