Social media is attracting more financial advisors, even as compliance officers raise flags about practices that may violate industry regulations. But the two sides don’t have to co-exist antagonistically, a panel of financial professionals agreed.

A recent webinar, “Strange Bedfellows: Compliance and Social Media,” featured licensed pros talking about their experiences with compliance officers as they maneuvered through their use of new channels. The webinar, sponsored by Financial Advisor magazine and Finect, the simple, compliant social media platform, showed that FAs and CCOs can work constructively as their practice makes greater use of social media.

What are compliance officers’ top concerns? What are the biggest obstacles to getting an advisor’s compliance officer on board with social media? Here is what the pros said.


Michael Kitces, director of research, Pinnacle Advisory Group and author of the “Nerd’s Eye View” blog

• Avoid “saying the same dumb stuff on social media that will get you in trouble by saying it anywhere else. Don’t talk in posts about offering guarantees or investment returns. Compliance officers want to see that you know what’s appropriate.

• CCOs aren’t following every development on social media. For example, not everyone knew that LinkedIn added a feature to remove endorsements just a few weeks after the endorsement feature was released. If you’re on top of what’s happening, you can drive the conversation with a compliance officer.

• "If you’re on social media and you’re talking about prudent cash-flow planning and budgeting, this has no relationship to what CCOs are worried about."


Brittney Castro, founder, Financially Wise Women, and a registered rep with LPL Financial

• Compliance officers want all content pre-approved, and all disclosures posted on her Web site and social media profiles.

• When she started in social media several years ago, she found it was helpful to educate compliance officers on what she wanted to accomplish, in terms they understood. For example, she likened putting a post on Twitter to being on the radio.

• “I followed the process. I asked them, ‘What do you need from me in order to get this approved or allow this to happen?’ and I listened and I did that. It takes a lot of work, but I would do it. I would submit, I would get their feedback, I would make the changes, I would resubmit. And I think they knew that I was taking this seriously. And then they were more willing to work with me.”


Charles Massimo, founder of CJM Wealth Management:

• Be careful about putting opinion in your posts. Compliance officers prefer the posts be fact based.

• Social media posts need to be archived and available when a regulator walks through the door.

• “Am I fully compliant? I’m not sure because there’s still a lot of questions about what’s fully compliant for social media. But at least I want to show that I’ve made an effort with having a policy and procedure and being able to store all my posts.”


Bob Bacarella, founder of asset manager Monetta Group

• The most important issue to CCOs is to have a social media policy in place and a procedure for tracking what’s being posted.

• Practices are monitored very closely to ensure that procedures are followed and claims aren’t being made on social media that can mislead investors in any way.

• “The thing we’re concerned with is being the first mouse in the compliance trap. We’d rather analyze what the others currently are doing with social media and see how that fares with regulators, and implement policies around what’s already been tried and tested.”

Jerry Gleeson is senior editor and community manager for Finect, based in Greenwich, Conn.