To compile WealthManagement.com's ranking of the most influential regional and wirehouse brokerage firms on social media, we looked at the three biggest components of social media today: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. To be fair, many firms have a presence outside of these three areas including on Google+, YouTube, Instagram and personal blogs. But we used platforms that were both most influential, as well as the ones used by a majority of the firms.
Starting in early January, we gathered snapshots of the firms’ number of LinkedIn followers, as well as the number of likes on each firm’s actively managed and maintained Facebook page.
Because Twitter is so much more than just the number of followers a brand has in any given day, we calculated a firm’s Twitter global influence score and outreach level using social monitoring site Kred.com. The site measures influence by assessing how frequently a firm is retweeted, replied, mentioned and followed on Twitter. The outreach level reflects firms’ engagement with others and the level they help others spread their message.
The compiled data was then adjusted by firms’ advisor headcount based on Cerulli Associates and used to score the firms. Firms without an official presence in any given social media channel scored a zero in that category. The scores in each category were weighted and standardized, and then the average total score was ranked to form the final list.
