Promoted to Assistant Manager: Social Media ETF's Assets Soar

"But now... now I'm washing lettuce. Soon I'll be on fries; then the grill. And pretty soon, I'll make assistant manager, and that's when the big bucks start rolling in," said the character Maurice in the 1988 film "Coming to America" and how that applies to today's ETF world can be easily explained. A couple of weeks ago, the Global X Social Media Index ETF (Nasdaq: SOCL) was washing the proverbial lettuce with just a small amount of supporters.Thanks to news of a little something called the Facebook IPO, SOCL and several other ETFs have gotten a nice boost.Yes, SOCL is down 2% late in Monday's session, but that's after a torrid run that saw the ETF surge 14.5% before today on a year-to-date basis. Volume is still robust as SOCL has experienced another six-figure day of turnover and that's after average daily trade for the ETF was around 6,000 shares just a few days ago.More importantly, SOCL has seen an astounding surge in assets under management. Prior to news of the Facebook IPO, the ETF which debuted in November, had around $1.4 million in AUM. Heading into the start of trading today, that number had swelled to almost $5.3 million, according to data on the Global X Web site. Sure, Facebook has helped SOCL earn its way to "assistant manager," but the $5 million mark is an important one for a new ETF to crack and to do so in less than three months is arguably impressive when considering SOCL was met with more criticism than applause when it debuted. All this and Facebook still isn't public. It's enough to make one wonder what type of impact Facebook will have on SOCL when the social media darling does go public.