Social Media Hubs
http://www.wsj.com/articles/financial-advisers-leverage-social-media-for-new-business-1476331260
Today, the idea of hand-writing a letter and mailing it through the post office is becoming outdated. Social media is becoming more and more popular to contact others and is beginning to become the go-to method to network. More specifically, according to the article, financial advisers are using social media as a lucrative tool to help new businesses, as 85% of advisers surveyed are using social media day-to-day. Social media and the large network behind it is helping advisers gain new clients. The advisers are using multiple social media platforms to strengthen their client relationships, such as LinkedIn or Facebook. This calls for the need to determine which social media platform will be most beneficial to the financial advisers.
This connects to the concepts we are currently learning in class regarding ‘hubs and authorities’. Relating to the article, financial advisers realize the effectiveness of using social media as a means of helping new businesses and want to find the best social media platform that will put them in contact with the most clients and strengthen their relationships. Using the ‘hubs’ and ‘authorities’ principle, a financial adviser will be able to determine which social media platform will have the greatest degree, and thus pursue using that social media. The clients can be seen as the ‘hubs’, and the social media platforms can be seen as the ‘authorities’ in this social network. Each client is using a certain number of social media platforms, often more than one. Each connection represents an arrow between a ‘hub’ and an ‘authority’. The social media platform that is being used by the most clients will have the largest degree, thus meaning that it is more marketable than lower-degreed social media platforms.
This article emphasizes the effectiveness of using the ‘hubs and authorities’ principles in the real world. Financial advisers can create a simple hub and authority graph and then determine based off of the degrees of the hubs and/or authorities which social media platform(s) will be best to use.