Reuters on $TICKER; Why the cashtag matters on Twitter and StockTwits

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". For stock market investors, Twitter began as a retail oriented tool, and it has since evolved into an institutional investor tool. This is confirmed in this story by Reuters: How investors use Twitter:

"Ever since the $TICKER tag was introduced on Twitter two years ago, active traders and investors have used the 140 character message stream to share tips, ideas and news. Most companies whose stocks were the subject of those tweets ignored the chatter the same way they ignore online chat rooms. Worried about inadvertent selective disclosures, corporate spokespeople kept their own Twitter conversation focused on routine PR matters, and steered away from financial and investor information.

That is changing fast as companies figure out how to tweet without crossing the foul line. A recent study of more than 600 public companies using social media found that two-thirds of them employ Twitter to communicate directly with investors, up dramatically from two years ago when just a handful were starting to tweet.

The study, conducted by Q4 Web Systems, a Toronto-based consulting firm that advises corporations on using the web, reported that natural resources and tech companies represent the greatest number investor-tweeting companies, followed by services, industrials, basic materials, and retail companies.

The survey cited emerging “best practices” these companies use when tweeting investors, including:

• live tweeting during earnings conference calls, analyst investor days and annual meetings;
• reaching out to investors for questions prior to an earnings call;
• answering investor questions live for all to see;
• linking to breaking news, analyst reports and opinions on the company or the industry;
• inviting followers to webcasts, conference calls and video blogs;
• using unique #HASHTAGS for specific events to make them easier to find later."

When Derwent Capital raised an insitutional hedge fund based on Twitter sentiment, the views from market professionals changed as identified by this article at The Atlantic Wire:

"You might think a 140 character tweet doesn't have much power, but, as one hedge fund proved, Twitter can help you win the stock market. "Derwent Capital, the hedge fund that is using Twitter sentiment to make its investments, beat the market--and other hedge funds--in its first full month of trading," Lauren Dugan reports. Using an algorithm based on the social media mood that day, the hedge fund predicted the market to make the right trades. Sounds unbelievable that something cluttered with mundane musings and media links could have anything smart to say about the market. But it's working so far.  

The idea behind it. Social media is a powerful force in the market--we think it could be making things worse. This algorithm puts those ideas to the test. It's based on a paper that came out of University of Manchester and Indiana University, which found a correlation between mood and Twitter, explains Bloomberg's Jack Jordan."

StockTwits - Next up was StockTwits, which is a verticle style application of Twitter focused in on being "a communications platform for the investing community". StockTwits is specific to investors. Twitter has financial messaging co-mingled with consumer messaging.

StockTwits boasts having a solid mix of professional traders, long-term investors, and hedge fund managers.  As such, the StockTwits site has significant appeal for companies looking to have their message heard. The company was founded in 2008 by long-time investor Howard Lindzon.

StockTwits created the $TICKER tag to enable and organize “streams” of information around stocks and markets across the web and social media. These streams provide new forms of insight, ideas and information that are used by investors, analysts, media and others as they research stocks and manage their investments. Other sites that use $TICKER include InvestorsVillage.com, InvestorsHub.com and TweetTrader.net.

A distinctive benefit to posting a message on StockTwits as opposed to Twitter is the "distribution reach."  All messages sent through Twitter are automatically posted on StockTwits, and they make their way to:

• CNNMoney.com,
• Yahoo! Finance,
• Bloomberg,
• The Globe and Mail,
• Bing, as well as
• Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

Much of ProActive's distribution from the ProActive Newsroom.com is via our ProActiveNR Twitter account and our client's Twitter accounts which feed into StockTwits $TICKER system.

Today, more than 150,000 investors, market professionals, and public companies share information and ideas about the market and individual stocks using StockTwits, producing streams that are viewed by an audience of over 40 million across the financial web and social media platforms.

With StockTwits’ Investor Communications Solutions any public company can quickly add their official communications to the $TICKER stream for their company on the StockTwits platform, across the leading financial web properties, and on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook – all from one centralized interface that provides metrics, monitoring, compliance, and workflow tools.

StockTwits is currently testing premium accounts for professional investors requiring compliance, workflow and analytics capabilities to fully take advantage of the StockTwits financial communications platform.

Google - If you Google our client "UNIS", it comes up with 239 million results and the United Nations International School is at the top of the page. If you Google "$UNIS", it comes up with 4050 results and every single result is about our client Unilife Corp (NASDAQ: UNIS).

$TICKER is fast becoming the new norm on Social Media sites as it allows stock information to be shared easily. Look for traditional sites to pick up this sharing capability soon.

LinkedIn on LinkedIn - The First Earnings Call - $LNKD

Mario Sundar is LinkedIn's "Social Media Guy", and he blogs about social media's how to's for the LinkedIn Marketing and PR teams. Late last week, he put out a blog about the steps of preparation surrounding LinkedIn's call. Please note his focus on StickTwits and Slideshare.

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Step 1: Start with the Basics / 3 key social media channels

First off, figure out the key social media channels that’ll work best at disseminating information around the earnings to the right audiences (investors, customers, members of your service, etc.), in the right way (share friendly and compliant). This may seem simple, but planning every last detail whether it’s post, tweets or sequence of uploading content well in advance really helps.

Here are the three basic social media channels that we used for our first earnings call yesterday:

1. The LinkedIn Blog – post from the CFO
2. LinkedIn’s Company Page – will link to our twitter page @linkedin  (didn’t want too many tweets, cluttering our homepage there, so we decided to have select tweets that redirect to our Twitter page where I’d be live tweeting the call)
3. LinkedIn’s Twitter Page (real–time updates during the earning call)

In addition, specific to the earnings call – I found the following two channels helpful. More on that in just a second.

1. LinkedIn’s Slideshare Page
2. LinkedIn’s StockTwits Page

This is of course, in concert, with your existing official channels that should kick-start the process (there are mandatory regulations that govern this process; so make sure you work with your legal team on figuring out that order). In our case, right after the press release crossed the wire, and the PDF slides were up on our IR site, the social media component went into play. So, time it well and stick to your schedule.

Trust me, it’s all a blur once the call starts and you start live tweeting – plus, there are so many moving parts that you’ve got to be careful you don’t mess up the ordering or accidentally upload stuff before the official news is out there. Also, don’t schedule stuff for auto-publishing, cos, you never know when things break.

Step 2: Make it easy to share / Slideshare 

I think the biggest advantage that social media brings to the table is the ability to let users – members, investors or other bloggers get a hold of content (like earnings deck slides) and make it easy for them to share. The earnings call (in our case) was an audio webcast and you had to register to listen in. You could also download a PDF deck of slides, but you’d have to email that and there’s no way to tweet that either.

Enter Slideshare.

Not only does Slideshare make it easy for you to upload your slides in private mode (premium feature) so you have it ready to go when the call starts, they also offer customization that lets you feature your earnings slide on your Slideshare homepage. And, of course, it makes sense to add your Twitter and StockTwits widget as well.

Some examples of companies that use Slideshare around earnings: Dell, Amgen, and Pfizer. Here’s the brand new LinkedIn page.

Step 3: Get Compliant / Stocktwits

Finally, the biggest question that companies have about earnings call and social media is staying out of trouble and keeping your blog post/s and tweets compliant with regulations. First off, you wanna work closely with your legal team to nail the specifics around your Safe Harbor statement and Disclaimers, which we used on the blog post. But, what about tweets and 140 chars?

Enter Stocktwits.

If you’re live tweeting your earnings call — and I’d recommend you do that — ideally, you’d want to add a disclaimer to every tweet that contains financial information. Now, doing that manually is one heckuva problem and Stocktwits helped take care of that (premium feature we subscribed to).

They have a system which allows you to add a disclaimer to every tweet (it may be a simple tweet, link to other webpages, a slideshare page, etc.) That does reduce the # of characters for your tweet (from 140 to 117) but from my perspective the premium feature was worth the peace of mind. In addition, they allow you to send this out to your Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook pages.

Here are some examples of companies that have used Stocktwits in a similar fashion: eBay, Dell, AEP.

And, here’s our Stocktwits LNKD page.

To summarize, the earnings call was like our other recent announcements on social media but the two new components that made the earnings call simpler, were Slideshare and Stocktwits. Here’s how I described it on their official blogs:

As a social media company, it was a no-brainer to use Slideshare to share our earnings call slides on our corporate blog. While Slideshare made it easy for our readers and followers to share this content virally, Stocktwits ensured that our status updates and tweets were compliant; both necessary components for an effective social IR strategy.

LinkedIn’s First Earnings Announcement Deck, Q2 2011

View more presentations from LinkedIn

Why we like StockTwits as a platform and a company...

StockTwits IR Suite’s “Social Dashboard” - More data about engagement...

We have been working with Stock Twits for some time now, and they have come out with a very interesting product for clients called the "StockTwits IR Suite", and it includes:

Verified Ticker Pages – These provide companies prominent message placement on ticker pages as well as customizable information panels that can display corporate blog, YouTube channel and SlideShare presentation links.

Social Distribution – This allows companies to disseminate information in real-time across multiple networks via StockTwits through links to other social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as to the sites of StockTwits’ distribution relationships including Yahoo! Finance, CNNMoney, Reuters.com, Bing Finance and Investopedia.

Social Dashboard – This provides companies a powerful central command center that allows investor relations professionals to manage social monitoring and measurement of their social media reach and impact across the entire StockTwits network.

The StockTwits IR Suite is available at no cost for a limited time to U.S. public companies and the social compliance add on is $99 per month.

With an additional solution entering beta this month, we will continue to add products which allow regulated members of the investment community to fully participate in the StockTwits social platform, reach investors across the StockTwits network and maximize scoial media use.

For more information on the StockTwits IR Suite, please contact Chris Bullock, vice president of corporate solutions at cbullock@stocktwits.com or visit stocktwits.com/ir.

For more information, see the Stock Twits blog.

StockTwits - establishing a leadership position in financial social media

The innovation taking place and ingenuity being exhibited in social media continues to accelerate at warp speed. In the financial world, we continue to see the coalescence and overlapping of investor relations and public relations roles.  This is because the audiences that comprise a company’s investor community and relevant corporate community are no longer mutually exclusive. To this end, public companies are leveraging social mediums to reach both their investor and customer audiences. 

At ProActive we have created a powerful digital platform (PRISM) to heighten our company clients’ visibility and increase their transparency in their quest to better connect with these very audiences.  Sourcing third party content and establishing relevance to our client companies is a large part of what we do.  It’s all about relevance. In the eyes of these audiences, third party content tied into a company’s product and/or service is more effective in validating the product and or service of these companies. Once the content is created, getting it seen by investors is where the real value is added.

One of the content distribution sites we work closely with is StockTwits which is the largest social network for the investor community (70,000 members and counting). The site, and its parabolic popularity growth amongst investors, is a tremendous asset it furthering our client companies’ awareness goals. Investor Relations organizations like ours, have the ability to post information on their client companies and create a thread.  Messages that are posted by the respective IR firm are denoted as such with a green “IR” tab. 

Similar to ProActive's Twitter account, comments from investors on StockTwits are short, sweet and to the point. A major distinctive benefit to posting a message on StockTwits as opposed to Twitter is the "distribution reach."  All messages sent through Twitter are automatically posted on StockTwits, BUT the distribution ends there. However, messages posted on StockTwits make their way to:

• CNNMoney.com,
• Yahoo! Finance,
• Bloomberg,
• Bing, as well as
• Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. 

Also, StockTwits is specific to investors. Twitter, in contrast, is not.  Financial messaging is co-mingled with consumer messaging.  The site boasts having a solid mix of professional traders, long-term investors and hedge fund managers.  As such, the StockTwits site has significant appeal for companies looking to have their message heard.  

Howard LindzonI recently had the opportunity to chat with StockTwits CEO, Howard Lindzon (see his Blog which ranges from Biotech to Bat Mitzvah!). It is clear that he has an ambitious vision for the site. He states:

“On our site, investors and traders alike have the ability to have their comments amplified to the most heavily trafficked financial websites.  StockTwits is one of the most powerful centralized social distribution channels in existence for companies listed on NASDAQ, NYSE or AMEX. We have major plans in the pipeline to grow our relevance and our value proposition.”

Consistent with this financial social media trend, I am fascinated by recent news of a new hedge fund being formed. A UK-based hedge fund whose entire investment style is predicated on Twitter sentiment was set to launch on April 1^st. As reported here earlier this week, the fund was originally set to kickoff with $40 million in assets. Indications of interests have ballooned to around $100 million and have thus caused the fund’s launch to be delayed.  

Popularized by a strategy study conducted last year, the Derwent fund intends on utilizing sentiment signals from Twitter messages to predict short-term deltas in broader-based market indices.  In the study, it was documented that sentiment change among Twitter users presage movement in the Dow Jones Index up to 6 days in advance with 87% accuracy. http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/16074.html

With this in mind, I am confident that more and more new and existing hedge funds will find creative ways to further leverage the information and data generated on StockTwits. 

All in all, social media is becoming more relevant and important for IR efforts. StockTwits is the most powerful entry point to social media for IR due to its’ growing targeted audience and its’ tremendous distribution and reach.  And we will see more professional traders using social media to find opportunities.  If your IR plan does not include StockTwits yet, it is never too late to get started.