Measuring Twitter Velocity
An additional way to examine industry Twitter usage is through a velocity test. To measure velocity, I examined the number of days firms need to post 20 tweets (unique content, not retweets or likes). I did this in September of 2015 and again last month. I found one point very interesting: in a small sample, there are not easily identifiable trends associated to specific firms (i.e., firm X always tweets the most).
Additionally, the sort rank for velocity changed dramatically. In 2015, BlackRock (3 days), PIMCO (4), and UBS (4) required the fewest days while AB (34) required the most. In 2016, PIMCO (3) increased velocity by 1 day, while the next two firms Goldman Sachs (5) and Natixis (7) stayed in similar velocity. The remaining firms slowed down a bit. The slowest 2016 firm, Voya (27), needed considerably less time than AB in 2015.
As social media adoption and usage evolves through its nascent stages for the asset management industry, I’d wager that a velocity test each month would result in differing sort ranks each time.