With my interests in both Social Media and Financial Services/Investment I found the following white paper very motivating when considering some of the work I am doing right now.
Harris Interactive has conducted a survey on ING’s behalf in the US contacting 1,021 general investors between the ages of 21 – 65 who have an investment account that enables them to buy stocks, funds and other securities as well as 912 ING Direct ShareBuilder customers customers within the same age groups. The study was conducted online from January 7 to 19, 2010.
The stand out point for me was that while the study found younger investors, defined as those aged 21 to 39, relied on financial websites and blogs as their primary source of informatrion for investment advice, they differed from their older counterparts (40 – 65yrs) in that they are far more likely to rely on family (40% v. 19%), friends (27% v. 14%) and work colleagues (17% v. 6%) for investment information.
This is a strong case for the use of Social Networking for providing investment tools and information, particularly to the 21 – 39 demographic.
The other point that was quite remarkable was that while fewer investors overall are relying on financial professionals for advice about their investments, preferring instead to take more personal responsibility, it’s the older investors (40 – 65) that are leading this trend, again being heavy users of financial websites, blogs as well as newspapers and periodicals.
Have embeded the report for you below so feel free to have a read, but again it’s a great heads up to the financial services community how the industry is changing.
Harris ShareBuilder Study of Individual Investors –
[...] two months ago I wrote an article called “Investors move away from advisors to become more Social” which focused on a Harris Interactive survey which was produced on ING’s behalf in the [...]