Are Asset Managers Taking The Gloves Off?

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After financial services, technology is the industry that I follow most closely. Over the years, I’ve envied much of what technology communicators did that investment managers couldn’t or wouldn’t.

For example, tech companies aren’t content to leave the ranking and evaluating to the media, analysts and other third parties—it’s common for vendors to publish their own comparisons. They want a say in how their company is being positioned vis-à-vis their competitors.

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5 Examples Of What Works For Asset Managers On Facebook

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What works on Facebook? Here’s a quick look at five asset manager posts that are generating the most response lately, as measured by the number of people who have “liked” the update.

Likes are a good thing. Brands whose Facebook fans engage with them more regularly (via Likes, Shares, comments or check-ins) have a greater likelihood of being seen in fans' news feeds. And this can result in amplifying the reach of your updates to your users' networks.

Across the board, this industry is woefully behind the Like totals being racked up by others. At the tippity top is Coca-Cola, whose 58 million likes make it Facebook’s most liked brand (after Facebook, that is). The most liked asset manager is Vanguard, with 115,000 likes as of this writing.

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What’s New And Different On Asset Manager iPad Apps

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The recent arrival of an iPad mini gave me a happy reason to take a fresh look at asset manager iPad apps and note a few advancements. I needed to re-install the apps that had been on my first gen iPad while a few were new to me. Henderson Global Investors launched its app just last week and I was catching up with the AllianceBernstein AB Connect app, launched in December with added content and capability for advisors with a log-in. And, it's been 10 months since my last post on the state of the art of version 1.0 apps.

How Will A Financial Advisor Engage?

The perspective I offer is as a user of lots of iPad apps and as a consumer of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) content on the desktop, iPad and mobile. My bias is for apps that are both device- and audience-aware, with a particular interest in how a financial advisor might engage. Three years after the iPad’s introduction, not every money manager offers its own app and it’s not a foregone conclusion that all will.

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20 Content Highlights To Remember From 2012

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I’ll never cease to marvel at the power of the written word. As just one recent example, I’m barely into Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, and Jobs’ life path has already been influenced by articles that appeared in two magazines (one in Esquire and the other in Popular Mechanics).

Content (to include more than just the written word in 2012) can be just so relevant, so provocative, so entertaining that it has an impact on us. We email a link to it, we tweet about it, we mention it in real life conversations, we conduct research based on it, we remember it.

The following is a list of 20 content highlights that I’ll take from 2012.
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Vanguard's SEO Advantage

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It’s been said that success comes from doing a lot of little things right.

Now I’ll concede that search engine optimization is not the primary reason that Vanguard sits atop the mutual fund food chain. But I recently noticed yet another online advantage that Vanguard has over most asset managers: Because it offers an extensive amount of content in front of the log-in to its financial advisor site, that content is well positioned to draw searchers to the site. (Having the resources to produce the content is another advantage, we should note.)

As you can see in the screenshot below from SpyFu.com (subscription required), advisors.vanguard.com ranked in the top 50 search results for almost 400 organic keywords last month. That—coupled with the more than 8,000 keywords driving traffic to Vanguard.com and 38 other Vanguard domains—is impressive. Other asset managers are doing well to rank 300 keywords for their Websites overall, again according to SpyFu.
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