Tweeting for Dollars: Can Twitter Help Land New Clients?

The other day I was reading a DealBook post about how some firms are trying to tap into Twitter to help investment advisors bring in new business.

It was an interesting read and dealt primarily with the compliance aspect of using Twitter, and even quoted Texas-based Socialware, a vendor that provides software for archiving messages and storing pre-approved tweets.

But what really jumped out at me came at the end pf the post: "Still, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney's Fay DeBellis, says she has not won any business from Twitter. She has had more success on LinkedIn, which she said brought her about $10 million worth of business over 18 months," the post read.

This year will represent the second straight year of firms on a wide scale experimenting with Twitter. Some are using it as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Some as a way to lure in new clients. Others are tapping into the site to collect information to make trades using sentiment analysis.

The latter use-case has the best chance of surviving if it can be proven to be effective. (My colleague James Rundle recently wrote an excellent piece on this topic for Waters magazine.) But on the asset management side of the business, it is still largely more of a compliance headache and has yet to show tangible benefits.

I believe that this year will be a make-or-break 12 months for Twitter, at least as the social networking site relates to the capital markets. For sentiment analysis there's a ton of potential. For everything else, I have my doubts that Twitter is worth the trouble.

Disagree? Send me a message on Twitter: @A_Malakian.