StockTwits Evolves, A Must for Investor Relations

By Estee Aina Huslan 2009381481
As new forms of social media change society, corporate investor relations teams are changing their communications strategies. Investor relations departments are getting more active in using social media as a way to reach investors. Social networking services such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have become increasingly important tools for investor relations departments.

Organization use social media tools for marketing, branding purposes and customer communications, in addition to investor relations. In general, social media applications that target the investment community tend to be far less advanced compared with communication intended for a company’s customers.Early users of social media for investor relations have known other social media sites that don’t quite meet their business needs. But that is about change as StockTwits introduces the world’s first set of social IR services built especially for public companies.




StockTwits is one of the new of social media tools made for investor relations. The purpose of StockTwits was to let investors follow news and discussion about companies that originated on Twitter. StockTwits is gaining thrust within the investor relations community by encouraging companies to originate their tweets on their service, not on Twitter. One benefit is that messages originated on StockTwits are not only picked up automatically by Twitter but also by other prominent investor websites such as Yahoo Finance, CNN Money and Bing Finance. This helps resolve concerns about limited disclosure of information that is distributed through Twitter.


Investor relations departments at major corporations including Ford, Dell and HP have embraced StockTwits, especially since StockTwits began earlier this year to offer companies verified accounts, meaning that investors can know with certainty that messages are coming directly from official company sources. “StockTwits is now the world’s largest social network specifically for investors,” said Chris Bullock, StockTwits’ vice president of corporate solutions, in an April 2011 interview with the author. “We say Facebook is for friends but StockTwits is for investors.”

Like Twitter, companies use StockTwits to communicate earnings results, merger and acquisition news, and other corporate events. Since the audience is investor-specific, StockTwits works well for companies that wish to share information about speaking at investor conferences, hosting events at their headquarters or sharing results in near real-time from annual shareholders’ meetings.

In conclusion, internet plays an important role in investor relations. Besides assisting the practitioner in daily task or job it also helps to build strong relationship between the organization and the investors. According to Patel (2000), in a world of constant information flow where investors expect a reply within the next few seconds rather than the next few days, public companies have to go beyond the sporadic press release and quarterly earnings call to adequately meet investors’ needs for information. Two benefits StockTwits offer IROs are the opportunity to monitor what investors are saying about their companies and a channel for engaging in two-way conversation with investors that is in the open, unlike private email and phone messaging.

Reference: http://irwebreport.com/20110608/social-ir-dashboard-stocktwit/