Twitter Lists Trump Social Media Directory; Introducing Investment Managers Twitter List

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There’s a certain poetry to what we’re doing today. 

Six months ago we created a social media directory to track the adoption by the asset management industry (including mutual funds, exchange-traded funds [ETFs], broker-dealers, financial advisors and investment media) of social media.

Since that time, two of the listings—mutual funds and ETFs using Twitter and financial advisors using Twitter—drew significant traffic from search engines, a welcome boost for this barely one-year-old site. (Notwithstanding our post last week and all other things being equal, we’d prefer to see site traffic climb, too.)

But today we’re redirecting that traffic to other sites where we think the searchers will be better served. Because this is a digital strategy site, we thought our readers might be interested in some of the details. And maybe our rationale will give you some ideas.

Let’s take the listing of mutual funds and ETFs on Twitter first. The following investment managers have Twitter accounts (others are out there but we know these to be bona fide):

So, it’s not as if maintaining this list was fatiguing, but the list did nothing more than link to each Twitter account page. If you were interested in hearing about new accounts, you’d have to remind yourself to check back here. That's not very social media-ish.

The Twitter list capability announced last month improves on that experience. If you're not familiar, here's a video that explains how Twitter lists work. Could they support something you're doing—even if the lists you create need to be private for now?

We’ve added all of the mutual fund and ETF Twitter accounts to a RockTheBoatMKTG (the name of our Twitter account) Investment Managers Twitter list.  Review the tweets, follow all on the list or follow some. Most important, as we discover new accounts, we’ll update the list and, if you’re following it, you’ll be updated too—no need to check back.

What won’t show are the two accounts—BlackRock and RidgeWorth—that are protecting their updates. But overall, Twitter lists provide a better experience.

Rock The Boat Marketing loses about 5% of its search engine traffic on keywords related to this topic as well as the opportunity to further engage what would be relevant traffic for the site. But we believe that if we love you (and we do) we must let you go—to maybe return to us forever? Oh and we stand to gain in awareness as owner of the Twitter list.

A much larger chunk of search engine traffic to this site (22%) has come from keyword searches of random financial advisor names plus Twitter. Clicking on the result and coming to RTB can’t have been a good experience for the searcher if they were looking for a financial advisor. There’s nothing for those searchers to see on this site except for the name that drew them here. In fact, those searches were the largest single source of our single-page views and inflated our bounce rate.

Starting today, we’re redirecting those searches to a better place: AdvisorTweets.com, our sister site (read all about it here). As we reported on its blog earlier this week, the average visit on AdvisorTweets lasts 6:30 minutes. People seem to be finding the tweet aggregation (trending themes, tags, shared links), search (of tweets, links and profiles) and history of value.

At the same time we’ve created three Twitter lists:

AdvisorTweets and Twitter lists provide two different experiences, both of which we’d like to support better than a search that lands on Rock The Boat Marketing.com. It’s all good.

Together, these moves essentially gut our social media directory. What’s left:

  • Mutual Funds And ETFs Using Social Media This is a wide open category with unlimited possibilities and, of course, we’re still interested. To date there’s a handful of investment managers that have presence on even the largest social media sites. Looks like this will be a slow-building page.
  • Financial Advisors Using Social Media Financial advisor/investor matching sites are doing a comprehensive job of aggregating advisor blogs, Facebook pages, etc. now—see FinanceAnswers.com, for one example. We won’t continue to maintain this page, re-directing instead to AdvisorTweets.
  • Broker-Dealers Using Social Media Again, we’re still interested but nobody here but us crickets.
  • Investment Media Using Twitter A November 7 update: Upon further reflection, we're re-directing this page, too. This RockTheBoatMKTG Investment Media Twitter List includes the accounts on our previous page, as well as a few more.

To make a long story short, we’re leaving the remaining social media directory pages out there but without fanfare. In place of the Social Media Directory promotion on our home page, we’ve added a short plug about our Introduction to Social Media for Asset Managers workshop.

What will we do to replace the lost traffic to the site? We are in the RTB Content Labs as we speak. We'll think of something...