Are you using StockTwits? If not, you need to give it a look

I can’ t recall the exact date I went to StockTwits online — it was about this time one year ago — but I do remember that I was immediately captivated by it. What the site essentially offers is real-time commentary by traders who use Twitter to discuss what they are doing. The company was co-founded by Soren Macbeth and Howard Lindzon. You can see Soren on CNBC from April 2009 here talking about the company. Howard also is a co-founder of the fund SocialLeverage, which has invested in companies like TweetDeck and Bit.ly.

StockTwits - Real Investors. Real Ideas. Real time.

While the site is geared towards traders of stocks, futures, options and currencies, it also can act as a source of vital information for communicators doing or working with investor relations. As a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: CME), I can watch what shareholders are saying about our company — how they react to our news, discuss the company, discuss competitors and trade our stock. Rather than wait to read the latest analyst reports or view a Google/Yahoo chat board, I can now read in real-time what our shareholders are talking about.  In addition, the page adds a real-time news stream about our company and a daily/weekly/monthly chart on our stock. If you work for a publicly traded company, or your clients are publicly traded, you now have a new tool to listen to a key audience.

Monitoring the competition also has its advantages via StockTwits. As outlined above, you can replicate the same strategy that you have established for your own company and now expand this to all your competitors. I’ve set up my StockTwits porfolio to track other financial exchanges in order to stay on track of their shareholder streams, how they are communicating to shareholders, and then report back anything I see as important or timely.

StockTwits has also expanded beyond their web site. The company recently launched a desktop application that has a look and feel of TweetDeck but geared toward traders. Two features I particularly like about the desktop application include: The ability to create or join individual groups that are topic specific (very helpful for our exchange-listed products to follow customers), and the ability to create groups in order to send private messages directly to the entire group or to multiple groups that don’t appear in the public stream. The company has also launched its own web TV program at StockTwits.tv.  

While I’ve found StockTwits to a must-have site for me, the integration of investor relations and social media is still young. I read this post last week on Investor Relations and Web 2.0 very helpful, especially the spreadsheet at the very end. The spreadsheet alone is worth the read and to share with your investor relations team. 

This week in Chicago is our annual Futures Industry Association Exposition. I was fortunate enough to be asked to lead the first social media panel for any conference hosted by our key industry association. This panel would not be complete without the participation of Howard Lindzon and StockTwits and he graciously accepted my invitation. I plan to follow up this post later this week with an interview with Howard. If you have any thoughts on StockTwits, investor relations and social media, or questions you want me to ask Howard let me know.