Your Investment Feed: A Guide to Navigating Financial Social Media Content
Tyler was age 24 when he opened his first brokerage account. Not because a family member sat him down and walked him through it, not because a school course covered it, but because a video showed up in his feed one evening that made investing feel, for the first time, like something people like him actually did.
The video was from a creator he had been following for months. It was clear, energetic, and free of the jargon that had always made financial content feel like it was written for someone else. Tyler opened an account the following week. He started small, made some mistakes, learned from them, and built habits that eventually led him to work with an Investment Counselor.
His story is a version of something the research increasingly shows: social media, at its best, can open a door for investors who might otherwise never walk through it. But it is also a door that can open avenues of misinformation and scams. Knowing how to navigate financial advice, in a era of constant content, is a skill most new investors are learning on the fly.
The Social Media and Investing Statistics
The scale of social media’s influence on investing decisions is no longer marginal. It is mainstream.
FINRA’s 2025 report on social media-influenced investing found that many investors now receive financial advice from the internet, and 29% of all investors report relying on social media as an information source. YouTube is the most widely used platform for investment information, with 30% of all investors and 61% of those under age 35 using it as a primary resource.
More than 1 in 4 investors (26%) say they’ve made investment decisions based on advice from a social media influencer. That number jumps even higher among younger and newer investors, with 61% of those under 35 and 57% of those with less than two years of experience saying the same.
That is meaningful. Access to financial information, not just to people with more money or more education, is a real benefit of social media’s role in the financial landscape.
What Social Media Does Well
The benefits of social media as a financial literacy tool are genuine, provided that the content is accurate, and the viewer has a framework for evaluating it.
At its best, social media reduces the jargon and complexity that have historically made personal finance feel inaccessible. A two-minute video explaining compound interest can reach a 22-year-old who never took a finance class in a format they are more likely to engage in. That same content, if it were a paragraph in a government publication, might never be read at all.
Social media also creates representation. When investors from diverse backgrounds, life stages, and income levels discuss their financial journeys openly, it challenges the notion that investing is exclusively the domain of wealthy professionals. For first-generation investors and those without family role models who invested, seeing someone who looks like them discuss building a portfolio can be genuinely transformative.
The interactive nature of media platforms means that financial concepts can be explained, questioned, and refined in real time through comments and community engagement.
And for investors in the early stages of financial awareness, before they are ready to work with a professional, social media can act as an entry point for more complex concepts and keep viewers informed about relevant financial news in real time.
Where It Gets Complicated
The same features that make social media effective at spreading financial literacy also make it effective at spreading financial misinformation, and the two are not always easy to distinguish.
The most significant structural problem with social media as a source of financial information is the lack of accountability. A licensed financial professional is bound by fiduciary or suitability standards, continuing education, and ongoing supervision. A financial social media creator does not have the same constraints. Their content may be inaccurate, biased, incentivized by undisclosed sponsorships and while regulators like the SEC and FTC can act after the fact, there’s no mechanism requiring accuracy or disclosure before that content reaches an audience.
Algorithm design compounds the problem. Social media platforms are built to maximize engagement, not necessarily accuracy. Content that generates strong emotion, excitement, urgency, and fear of missing out may perform well regardless of whether the underlying financial advice is sound. An enthusiastic recommendation for a speculative investment might spread further and faster than a measured, accurate explanation of its risks, regardless of which one turns out to be right.
The echo chamber effect is another consideration. Investors who engage with certain types of financial content are progressively shown more of it, narrowing the range of perspectives they encounter and reinforcing existing views rather than challenging them.
How to Apply a Critical Eye to Investment Content
“Speaking with an Investment Counselor can take deepen the conversation around financial life and ground it in their actual situation: their goals, their timeline, their real risk tolerance,” says Scott Mass, Senior Vice President, Investments at David Lerner Associates.
The goal is not to avoid financial content on social media entirely. It is to engage with it in a way that extracts genuine value without absorbing the risks.
A few questions are worth asking of any financial content encountered online.
- What are this person’s qualifications? Not follower count or production quality, but actual credentials. Are they a licensed investment professional? Are they regulated? Do they disclose their qualifications, or simply their returns?
- What is the incentive behind this content? Undisclosed sponsorships are a documented and persistent problem in financial social media. If a creator is recommending a specific product, platform, or security, is that recommendation independent or compensated?
- Is this advice generic or personalized? A recommendation that does not account for your specific income, tax situation, risk tolerance, timeline, and existing assets is, at best, general information. Treating it as personalized guidance is one of the most common ways social media financial content causes harm.
- Does this content create urgency? Legitimate investment opportunities do not expire at midnight. Urgency is a sales technique, not a planning framework. Any content that pressures you to act quickly on a financial decision should be viewed with significant skepticism.
Use Social Media as a Starting Point, not a Finishing Line
The issue is not avoiding social media as an information hub for financial knowledge, but contextualizing it correctly: as a resource, filtered through a framework that asks not just whether the content is engaging, but whether it is accurate, accountable, and relevant to their specific situation.
Material contained in this article is provided for information purposes only. It is not intended to be used in connection with the evaluation of any investments offered by David Lerner Associates, Inc. This material does not constitute an offer or recommendation to buy or sell securities and should not be considered in connection with the purchase or sale of securities. These materials are provided for general information and educational purposes, based on publicly available information from sources believed to be reliable. We cannot assure the accuracy or completeness of these materials. The information in these materials may change at any time and without notice. The subject of this article is fictitious and created for illustrative purposes only. It is based on events of a similar nature and should not be interpreted as a direct depiction of any specific individual, organization, or incident. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased, or actual events is purely coincidental.