Josh Brown, the New York-based financial advisor whose Twitter account and financial blog are two of the most widely followed of their kinds, stressed to a group of advisors at Global Macro that social media is critical for them to connect with new prospects and clients.
“The clients of the past 25 years are not the same clients of the next 25 years,” Brown, who also hosts CNBC's “The Halftime Report,” said at ETF.com’s second annual Global Macro conference in New York. “We have to find new ways to reach them.”
Twitter has been good to Brown [Twitter handle @ReformedBroker], though Brown stressed that he wouldn’t have 110,000 followers if he didn’t have his blog “The Reformed Broker” as a cornerstone of his online presence.
Not Your Father’s Advisory Days
Overall, he stressed that connecting with the clients of tomorrow will be decidedly different than in the past.
“You can’t be the guy who wears a suit and tie seven days a week,” Brown said. “That doesn’t work anymore.”
Brown is the chief executive officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, which practices a variation of asset-allocation-based passive investing. The firm has about $170 million in client assets, with the average account of about $1 million, Brown told ETF.com. The firm also recently launched its own robo service, Liftoff, targeting younger, or tomorrow’s, investors.
Plenty Of Social Media Options
While Brown’s Twitter success suggests that the micro-blogging service may be the best way to keep connected to clients and prospects, Brown said there are plenty of options. Among those are LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, as well as relatively new presences such as Periscope and Meerkat.
Brown also said he’d like to develop more of a presence on YouTube, which isn’t social media in the sense Twitter or Facebook is, but has a vast potential for connecting.