By Weld Royal

Thomas Kopelman, 29, has an engaged social following that many financial advisors would envy. His podcasts have been downloaded nearly 100,000 times. On LinkedIn, he counts almost 16,000 followers. On X, formerly known as Twitter, his followers number more than 34,000, and react to posts that start like this one: "Great tax planning move for W-2 income people. Have a side hustle, consult, do outsourced marketing, etc. Anything where you get self-employment income. Then start a solo 401(k)..."

Kopelman co-founded AllStreet Wealth, a fee-only financial planning and investment management firm for millennials. It has about $25 million in assets under management, and a separate revenue stream from fees for business clients that he estimates will reach $1.4 to $1.5 million this year.

"All my clients come from Twitter, which surprises people, but that's my channel," Kopelman tells Barron's Advisor. He also talks about how he grew his social followers in a relatively short period of time, how he thinks about unregulated finfluencers, and why all advisors and especially next-gen advisors must use social media to grow their practices.

How did you become a financial influencer? Out of college, I started at a broker-dealer. The way that you're taught at those types of firms is sell, sell to everybody. I saw a huge issue: a lot of people needed my help, and what better way to do this than social media? Why don't I educate the people who I would like to work with on the things that they need to know? Then, once they need help, they'll reach out to me because they know I'm an expert.

My first job was very much like, you can't do social media, you can't have a podcast, you can't have a blog -- everything has to get approved, and that takes a week. I thought, I've got to get out of here and go to the independent world.

Experienced wealth managers offered you advice and you ignored it? Every advisor told me, "use social media for networking, but you can't grow a business from it." But I was following good lawyers, good real estate agents, and good tax people online -- and I was learning from them. Why would that not apply to finance?

I'm not going to listen to advisors who are 30 years older than me, whose businesses are already built, and who don't have to grow in the world as it is today. I'm going to take a bet on social media being the best way for me to show people what I know and how I can help them. It's turned out incredibly well.

You decided to team up with another financial advisor? After a lot of begging, one of the top financial advisors, Justin Castelli, hired me. I worked with him for about a year, when he said, "You're not really getting anything from me anymore. You should just go launch your own firm. You have a great brand. You're ready to do it."

I was maybe a year and a half into social media, and still in the early stages of getting clients. I launched [AllStreet Wealth in September 2021 with Treyton DeVore], with the goal of working with millennials and helping them on financial planning. We've really moved into mostly working with business owners. We're now in the fourth year of running the firm. We'll probably do $1.4 to $1.5 million in revenue this year.

Of your 100 or so clients, how many run a business? About 60. My average client makes about a million dollars a year and is around age 40. A lot of them are very concentrated in the business they own. They have complex planning needs and want to pay for help. Some people have us manage investments, and some want to manage their own. We don't really care, as long as they cross our minimum fee, which is structured around cash flow, and then we charge 0.35% on any assets we manage.

We have about $25 million in assets under management. I have a licensed tax professional who's also a licensed financial advisor, and a full-time director of operations. There are three of us working with our clients.

Where do you find time to do social media? People think it takes a lot longer than it does. When I first started with social media about seven years ago, it took me forever. Now, I have over 200 podcasts out. I write two threads on Twitter a week, which are basically like blog posts. But 80% of what I put out is recycled. I look at [posts from] a year ago to see what did really well and I will use it again this year. It sounds crazy, but [in terms of devoting blocks of time to it] I usually spend one afternoon a week -- or, if I have a flight, I'll spend the whole flight doing it.

You repost content? A lot of advisors are scared of using anything that they've posted before. People see thousands of posts a day. There's no way they're going to remember them, and if they do remember a post, that means it was amazing. I look at myself on Twitter, I have about 35,000 followers. A year and a half ago, I had about 15,000, and the year before that, I had 7,500. Every year, I'm basically doubling my audience. None of those people have seen my great stuff from earlier.

What's your most important social channel? All my clients come from Twitter, which surprises people, but that's my channel. I basically have three posts every single day. Then, I typically include one to three updates a day where I'm randomly like, "Oh, I just finished a meeting, and this is a really good thing I want to share."

What about LinkedIn or other channels?

On LinkedIn, all I do is use what worked well on Twitter in the prior months. I schedule those posts and maybe expand them a little bit, but I spend about 10 to 15 minutes a month on LinkedIn. Personally, I don't like scrolling LinkedIn. It doesn't feel like people are having conversations and learning. You can grow a financial planning firm on YouTube, on Instagram, on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, but it's got to be the channel that you actually spend time on because you have to be engaging. You have to talk to people. You have to respond to your comments for it to work.

How do you convert followers into clients? The DIYers of the world that were never going to hire an advisor are going to learn from me. The people who are meant to have a financial advisor are just going to know that I'm talking about things that are relevant to their lives. Then all of a sudden, their business is growing, they're making a million plus dollars a year, and they're like, "I really need an expert. I'm going to reach out to Thomas, who knows his stuff."

There's a lot of deceptive financial information on social media. You're competing against people who have no regulations and can say whatever they want -- and they make up stuff. I have to put factual knowledge out there and educate people so they don't fall victim to random individuals who aren't licensed but are making up all these things about taxes, or how anybody can generate all their income through real estate.

What guidelines do you follow to make sure your posts aren't misleading? I only share factual information. You still have to make it interesting, so you need good hooks to get people into your post. I share how I think about financial planning. Social media is about showing who you are so people can decide if they want to work with you.

Are there topics you avoid? I'm not giving investment advice on social media. I'm not giving any specific tax advice. Everything I'm doing is just financial planning.

You are invited to present at conferences about social media. What topics draw interest?

I'm speaking at four conferences this year. I have about 600 advisors who are on the database for my newsletter [on Money tips for business owners]. Whenever I host digital office hours [for advisors], I get 50 to 150 advisors coming to ask questions. They're always like, "I feel like I'm too late to social media." And I say, "name 10 advisors that do social media well." Nobody can get past five. Think about how much of a competitive advantage you have if you can't name 10 people doing social media well.

Who comes to your digital office hours?

I'll have people from broker dealers, people from wirehouses. I'll have other advisors that are already solo. Some of them are older advisors in their 40s and 50s who are trying to adapt to where the future is going.

What misconceptions do advisors have about social media? They think it is like Nike. They're going to put out a great post, somebody's going to read it and be like, "I got to go hire them." That's just not how it works. It isn't about converting clients based on one post. It takes nurturing -- so you're present in somebody's mind once they need help.

What about advisors who say they can't get social posts approved by compliance?

You can work with your compliance team. I know a lot of advisors at firms where they have compliance teams that do a great job. It's easy to hide behind compliance, but [most advisors] can figure out how to work within the rules and with the compliance team.

Are there social media mistakes you see regularly? The first mistake is sharing links. They post, "check out this blog post that my firm wrote on HSAs [health savings accounts]," and share a link to it. Nobody's going to click on that link. Stop sharing links to your company's website.

Another one is to stop talking about yourself. There will be people who have three posts a week. One will be the link to the company blog. The next one will be talking about how "our clients love working with us because we're fiduciaries and we put them first." Maybe they have one post a week that is educational. We know only 20% to 30% of your audience sees each post so if you only post something educational four times a month, you're educating somebody six to 12 times a year. That's not going to work. You've got to be educating them way, way more.

Advisors think that they automatically should be good at social media. I always equate this to sports. You've never played sports, and you want to pick up a basketball. You're not going to be good. You've got to put in the reps, work hard. It's going to take time, and you're going to get better.

Any final social media advice for fellow financial advisors?

People assume social media is the opposite -- that they should start posting, and within a month, they're going to have all these people fighting to work with them. The reality is, you're not going to have their eyes and the attention after a month. Your writing isn't going to be very good. You're not going to be making it interesting yet. I think it's important to set your expectations.

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May 15, 2025 15:47 ET (19:47 GMT)

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