Fundamental Media Insights


Research insights
15 December 2020

Asset managers more positive in their social media posts of Q3

The number of social media posts by the top 10 asset managers dropped in Q3, but the sentiment of their posts was more positive

Key points:

  • Asset managers posted less on social media during Q3 compared to the previous two quarters, but the sentiment of their posts was significantly more positive
  • LinkedIn still has the highest level of engagement across social media
  • While the engagement with posts on ESG has decreased slightly since Q2, it continues to be the most engaging topic

Asset managers posted less on social media during Q3 compared to the previous two quarters, but the sentiment of their posts was significantly more positive, research by Fundamental Media has found.

We have analysed more than 7,500 organic social media posts by the ten leading asset managers in the first nine months of 2020. During Q3, these managers uploaded 2,400 new organic posts, including more than 750 LinkedIn posts.

The decrease in the average number of posts per asset manager across all social media channels continued in Q3. July was the month with the lowest engagement per post on textual social media during the first three quarters of the year, slightly lower than May.

Our Q3 research for the first time includes analysis on asset managers' YouTube videos. The average engagement per video has increased since the start of the year, at 4% during Q1, 3% during Q2, and 6% during Q3. Six out of ten YouTube videos uploaded in the last three quarters are in English, followed by Italian (10%), German and French (8% each), Spanish (6%), and Chinese (5%).

LinkedIn still has the highest level of engagement across social media. On both LinkedIn and Twitter, engagement levels were similar in Q3 compared to Q2, but sentiment increased significantly on all textual social media.

Social media posts Q3

LinkedIn and YouTube are getting the highest engagement. While we see slight decrease of the engagement figures of LinkedIn, we see significant growth of the engagement figures of YouTube in 2020.

Engagement on LinkedIn

The ten asset managers published more than 2,400 LinkedIn posts during the first nine months of the year. The graph below shows the 17 most engaging topics of the third quarter, their frequency, and overall sentiment.

While the engagement with posts on ESG has decreased slightly since Q2, it continues to be the most engaging topic. LinkedIn posts on strategy and equities also received high engagement in Q3. The topics that asset managers most often discussed during Q3 were expert views, pandemic, ESG, market, and economy.

There were no major changes in the average sentiment for any of the topics when comparing Q3 to Q2 of 2020, except for Europe and equities. Perhaps surprisingly, topics such as pandemic, economy, and crisis increased their average sentiment per post quarter by quarter since the beginning of the year with a score closer to the neutral range of the distribution of asset management LinkedIn posts, i.e. between -1 and 1 as the lower and upper quartile.

Bubble chart social media Q3 2020

The size of the bubbles represents the number of posts on that particular topic. The sentiment analysis evaluates the opinions, sentiments, and emotions of the post (not the reaction to the post). Posts are classified as positive (1 or above) or negative (-1 or below) as a result of the difference between the number of positive vs negative words in each post.

Engagement levels dropped by an average of 20% between Q3 and Q2. The only topics that saw their engagement increase were strategy, equities, and thematic.

While portfolio allocation was the most engaging topic in Q2, the absence of any highly engaging posts on this topic in the third quarter has resulted in a much lower ranking for Q3.

When looking at the 25% of most engaging posts in Q3, 41% of these were about ESG, 33% contained an expert view from an influential figure and 22% were about the pandemic. We found correlations between topics within the same post. For example, strategy was discussed alongside the pandemic and equities. Posts on equities were mostly discussed by an expert at the company. Market, strategy, and America were also showing up in the most engaging posts about equities.

Social media engagement changes Q3 2020Social media frequency changes Q3 2020

From Q2 and ongoing, the topics "Coronavirus" and "Pandemic" classified separately in Q1, have been merged into one topic called Pandemic.


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