New social networks spring up all the time, but affluent investors are sticking with the Big Three Sites of Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Spectrem’s recent research details the many ways affluent investors use social media sites, and examines the differences in usage between the affluent investors and the extremely wealthy ones.  Click here for details on this report: “The Millionaire Investor 2017: Using Social Media and Mobile Technology in Financial Decisions”. 

For instance, among the Mass Affluent investors, with a net worth between $100,000 and $1 million, 67 percent are Facebook users, 38 percent are on LinkedIn and 33 percent visit YouTube.  Pinterest has moved past Twitter among the Mass Affluent, 18 percent to 16 percent. Usage of Facebook has actually decreased from the previous year, from 61 percent to 58 percent, but LinkedIn usage has grown from 31 percent to 38 percent.

Among Ultra High Net Worth investors (with a net worth of $5 million to $25 million not including primary residence), 50 percent use Facebook and 42 percent frequent LinkedIn. The only other sites to see at least 10 percent usage by UHNW investors are YouTube, with 27 percent, and Twitter, with 11 percent.

The Millionaires, those with a net worth between $1 million and $5 million, have a 59 percent participation rate on Facebook, 39 percent on LinkedIn, 28 percent on YouTube, with Pinterest at 15 percent and Twitter at 13 percent.  Among Millionaires, usage of all social media sites is growing, and use of LinkedIn has grown 10 percent in the past year.

As many as 21 percent of UHNW investors visit Facebook between two and five times a day. As many as 15 percent of UHNW investors go to Twitter with the same frequency. LinkedIn is much more a one-time-a-day thing, with 30 percent saying they visit less than once a day and 58 percent going there less than once a week.

Twitter usage is interesting and different between wealth segments. The wealthiest investors use Twitter most to follow news commentators (29 percent) and political commentators (26 percent) while the Mass Affluent use Twitter most to follow entertainers (43 percent). While 16-19 percent of all investors use Twitter to follow financial or investment commentators, only 4-5 percent follow their own financial advisor. This could be because the advisors do not have a Twitter account or do not promote their Twitter availability.

 

© 2015 Spectrem Group