TikTok app displayed on an iPhone. August 7, 2020.
Tara Naughton, senior vice president of intelligence at Storyful, is lucky: She really likes her job.
It also helps that Storyful has an interesting history, Naughton noted, having been founded by journalists in 2010 in response to the Arab Spring. The vision was to provide news organizations and other stakeholders with verified user-generated videos to help them more accurately report on the revolutionary protests that swept through Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Syria.
In 2013, the organization was acquired by News Corp., whose resources and support helped Storyful launch its Storyful Intelligence service aimed at helping business leaders navigate the rapidly growing information landscape of social media.
Fast forward to 2026, and Storyful Intelligence supports business leaders across an array of industries — including wealth management firms and key players in the retirement industry. Just last week, the Intelligence group produced an analysis of how “retirement planning authority” has migrated away from institutional sources in favor of social media gurus.
As the report shows, just five influencers and some 10 hashtags are associated with over half of all retirement planning conversations happening on TikTok. News organizations and industry professionals, by contrast, have far less traction in digital spaces.
Wealth management professionals could learn a thing or two from these online finfluencers, Naughton said — not about retirement planning itself but about how to better connect with information-hungry audiences where they exist.
“The good news is that financial services organizations can correct the course with a well-informed and authentic brand strategy that meets people where they are at,” Naughton said. “The amount of data available today to help brands craft their approach gives me a lot of optimism about a better way forward.”
To that end, Naughton shared three tips for ThinkAdvisor readers who want to better define and amplify their brand in a social-media dominated world.
1. Don’t lead with product.
As Naughton explained, retirement offerings designed around institutional assumptions will miss audiences whose expectations were shaped elsewhere.
For example, online personalities may have products they frequently criticize or argue against, such as certain types of annuities or life insurance products. Naturally, such voices tell their audiences to be skeptical of industry professionals who attempt to market or sell such products or services.
Financial professionals know that blanket rejections of entire classes of financial solutions are ill-founded, Naughton said, but the typical person seeking information probably doesn’t.
When clients arrive with creator-formed expectations, advisors risk becoming the bearers of unwelcome validation. This can create friction at exactly the point where trust should be reinforced, Naughton warned.
2. Take a broader view of delivering value.
Whether a social media post is about a breaking news story or a deep dive into a technical retirement planning topic, Naughton said, it is vital to ensure that the audience gets tangible value out of the storytelling. Currently, what most people seem to be seeking online as it relates to retirement planning is a mixture of fear mitigation and emotional support — not answers to challenging retirement math scenarios.
When fear is the dominant frame, Naughton said, institutions that lead with product features or technical information aren't just ineffective; they’re tone-deaf. In high-anxiety environments, that quickly converts to reputational liability.
3. Credibility collapses during downturns, so act now.
As Naughton warned, the next market correction will test whose voices people trust.
The notion that a downturn could cause people to seek reassurance from the institutions that have enjoyed earned trust, like big banks or other longstanding financial institutions that have weathered tough times before, may have been true in the past, Naughton said. Today, institutions that have grown to be structurally peripheral to the online discourse about retirement will have no trust reserves when reassurance matters most.
This should be a major motivator for industry voices to start to regain credibility online, Naughton concluded.
Credit: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM
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