Twitter burst onto the scene in 2006, but the social media site StockTwits followed a couple of years later as an online platform for financial communication.
Similar to the popular # hashtag that can be attached to tweets, the $ ticker is linked to stock and company names on StockTwits so that an audience of more than 40 million people can follow streams of information.
Here, Sean McLaughlin, StockTwits’ business development director, discusses the site’s evolution.
How has StockTwits evolved over time?
In the beginning it was more about watching the ticker stream and putting the pieces together on your own. Over time we’ve rolled out a sentiment gauge, so when users share an idea they can tag it as bullish or bearish. And we have sentiment charts for many top tickers.
What other high-tech features have recently rolled out?
A heat map to allow users to visually key in on which stocks are having seen the most message volume. It’s not a perfect indicator but you see which stocks are dominating conversations. Another tool we have is top-trending tickers where someone can quickly get up to speed to see the top stocks people are talking about today for whatever reason.
Any plans to roll out in the Middle East?
Currently we only support tickers from the US and Canada, because that’s where most of the financial action takes place. With regard to the UK, the Middle East, Hong Kong and Singapore, we certainly have users logging into our site everyday from those regions and if we had 100 people pinging us from any of those regions we might consider expanding there.
How does the site generate revenue?
Advertising is a small part of our long-term strategy. We work with public companies to use our platform for communication and engagement. We have 220 companies now: Ford, Intel, Verizon-every one of them uses the platform for revenue trends, earnings or guidance outlook.
What are they using the platform for beyond that?
Ford’s chief financial officer just hosted a Q&A on our site. We picked out 10 to 15 of the best questions from the community. Every company uses the platform to communicate earnings, but others go above and beyond.
business@thenational.ae
