StockTwits – CNBC for the Social Media Age
First Published Wednesday, 23rd November 2011 02:26 pm from Xand : pcurley
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title="StockTwits"
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Our
Customer Spotlight series showcases the interesting ways our
clients are using Xignite's Cloud API's to
power their applications.
StockTwits is the
leading social network targeted at the investment community
reaching several hundred thousand users on StockTwits.com, and
tens of millions through the StockTwits Distribution Network.
Since its launch, StockTwits has garnered much praise, including
being named by Fast Company as one of the 10 most innovative Web
companies, and by Time Magazine, as one of the 50 best
websites.
Xignite recently spoke with Francis
Costello, Chief Operating Officer, and Chris Corriveau, Chief
Technology Officer of StockTwits, to learn more about this
fast-growing company.
Q: Describe the
StockTwits community?
Francis Costello
- StockTwits was founded in 2008 by Howard Lindzon, our
CEO. At that time Howard saw the opportunity to create an
investing community based around social media. The community
allows investors to share their investing ideas in 140-character
tweets, all in real-time. The value of StockTwits is very much
based on the wisdom of the crowds concept, with 1000's of our
users all contributing to create a unique financial
communications platform. StockTwits is fundamentally based on
this social construct, and is very different from the more
established financial media outlets such as CNBC, which involve
traditional one-way broadcast communication.
Q: Why has StockTwits been so
successful?
Francis Costello - I
think there are two main reasons for StockTwits' success to date.
First, StockTwits created and popularized the "$(Ticker)" tag
which allows users to follow a twitter
stream based on a security ticker. This innovation is at the very
center of all that we do. Second, we are very serious about
maintaining the quality of the conversation that our community
offers. We use both technology and people to curate and monitor
the community. We ensure that all of our house rules are strictly
enforced.
Both of these aspects mean that our
content gets broad distribution across the Internet including CNN
Money, Yahoo Finance, and Reuters. It also means that we have
been successful in bridging the divide between non-professional
and professional investors. Many professionals now use
StockTwits' social stream, to augment their more traditional,
news and price streams.
Q: How has Xignite's
market data Cloud API's helped StockTwits?
Chris Corriveau - StockTwits has obviously
experienced huge growth in the last few years. Because of this we
try to keep our development as agile and as lean as possible. We
look for technologies and partners that will allow us to maintain
this rapid rate of development. The Xignite service is so vital
to us because Xignite's real-time pricing provides our users with
instant context for StockTwits' social stream. We found Xignite's
Cloud API's to be very easy to work with and implement, offering
multiple data formats. We've also discovered, that as StockTwits
expands internationally, Xignite's broad global coverage means
that adding international market data is a simple and
straightforward proposition.
Q: What are
StockTwits plans for the future?
Francis
Costello - Apart from growing the community here in the
US, and expanding overseas, our other priority is to introduce
more services for our professional users. The main difference
with the professional market is that while StockTwits has obvious
appeal, the needs of professionals can be very different from our
non-professional users. Frequently many of the markets these
professionals operate in are highly regulated. In June of this
year we launched StockTwits Investor Communications Solutions,
which are services that allow public corporations and investor
relations professionals, to really take advantage of the
StockTwits platform to communicate directly with investors. The
service includes features like compliance functions that address
the unique legal challenges presented by regulated communications
in social media. As we offer more and more services to
professionals, we will continue to tailor our solutions to the
needs of different groups in this market.
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