BrightScope’s recent Twitter rankings placed Josh Brown, aka @ReformedBroker, at the top of the advisor heap. Here’s what Brown says you should be doing—and why he thinks he was tapped as No. 1.
“[Social media] is the opposite of everything you learned in your career. This goes back to when you were a human being. This is about making friends, being generous. The same things that work at forging relationships in real life. It’s a meritocracy. You don’t have to work at the right firm, you don’t have to have a certain pedigree or wear the right suit. No one cares about that in social media. That works in glossy brochures. I didn’t work at Goldman Sachs. I have no pedigree. I built my own business. I never worked for a famous hedge fund manager. I didn’t go to Harvard.
In social media it’s about your ideas and how you interact in your community. If you’re engaged, and nice to people, it’s going to work. Paying a consultant to send out tweets for you? You’re just wasting your time. I think there are a lot of people who are trying too hard. The fact that it sometimes works out that way [gaining a lot of followers] is a secondary and derivative thing. If you’re out there deliberately trying to get people to like you, you’re doing it wrong. The things that work on social media are not the things that work on mainstream media. On mainstream media, you want a focused message, and you’re conscious of every syllable coming out of your mouth. You typically have a PR person steering you. Social media is the opposite. We prize spontaneity, we prize honest interaction. Anything scripted or stilted is going to be ignored. Not everyone can do that or wants to do that. I think it’s a very specific personality type that thrives on social media. And it’s okay if that’s not you.”