Social media – namely Twitter – is creating a solid core adviser community in the UK. But for some it appears to be impinging on the daily efficiency of running their businesses.

If the number of tweets and level of industry ‘chatter’ are anything to go by it must be adding a few hours a day to the already busy workload of UK planners.

Interestingly there are a variety of tools around today allowing one to measure the degree of influence an individual or company has via the likes of Twitter.

In the UK, Richard Bishop, Howard Bullock, Martin Bamford, Richard Earl, Peter Matthew, Yvonne Goodwin, Paul Gorman, Emma Tozer, Ian Highton and Clare La Rue are respectively the top 10 most influential IFA’s on Twitter, according to a measurement tool developed by global PR firm, Edelman.

The tool, which provides an absolute rating for a Twitter account, considers four core attributes: Influence, Popularity, Engagement and Trust.

However a day after a letter was sent from Martin Bamford (third in the above list) to his local MP in support of the Retail Distribution Review – (many UK IFAs vehemently oppose large slices of the proposed legislation) – an Internet furore was sparked among IFAs that lasted the whole day and into the following day and resulted in hundreds of posts on various Twitter and media websites.

The interesting thing about all of this is the ‘influence’ that tools such as the one described above are referring to is typically within a given peer group – in this case IFAs.

The end client or consumer is largely left out of the equation as the industry uses the various social media tools and media ‘comment’ boxes to endlessly debate the merits of changes to legislation, often resorting to outright insults between the respondents to the benefit of no one.

Meanwhile, unless the regulator and Government are regularly monitoring these posts to better understand the opinion of the industry then the threads of commentary will largely fall on deaf ears and have no impact on the future construct of the industry whatsoever.

Yes, social media is an excellent way to understand and communicate with a given peer group on a much more regular and intense level, but for some it has become an obsessive tool and at worst a ‘time thief’ that adds only limited value if even the most mundane of developments are updated.

The challenge for IFAs is turning these excellent communications tools into prospective and existing client engaging facilitators – not simply updates of eating a nice ham sandwich or lamenting how the trains were late this morning.