Investor sentiment is a big deal to publicly traded companies. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to know what your investors are thinking by simply watching the ticker. Social media and social networking can be a great way to monitor this very important measure of investor relations.
Financial Blogs
Blogs are now the old guys on the block. Easy to set-up and simple to publish to, these are platforms are potentially as powerful as any other financial publisher. Their combination of experts and reach make them a great source of information on how the market perceives your company.
Blogs tend to be more candid and emotional about their stock picks and reviews–probably far more representative of the general market. Financial blogs are also often written by active investors, which gives you lots of mini-samples of investor attitude and beliefs about your stock.
However, possibly the most important advantage to financial blogs is the easy and efficiency with which you can aggregate and analyze them via RSS.
Investor Forums and Websites
Investor forums are legendary sources of hot tips and early trends. They are often the haunts of insiders, day-traders, and hedge funds–people hungry for any tiny edge. Unfortunately, they are very difficult to analyze or even monitor as an outsider. Often these forums are more a tool than a resource. Traders form tight communities of information networks and simple use the “right forum” to communicate. That means to the average outsider most of what you see is the noise, rarely spotting the real value in these communities.
Although it is occasionally interesting to peek into these venues you are probably unlikely to grab any real read on your company’s investors.
Twitter is fast becoming the new communication super-highway of many niches and markets. The investor community is an early adopter of this format. Operating much like instant messaging with a party-line twist you can do a variety of valuable things as an active investor.
- You can listen for tips
- You can test theories, and get reaction
- You can drive up ad down sentiment
- You can look for insiders
- You can track movement
Twitter is a great resource for investors trying to find and ride emotional waves. Investors have already figured that out and are big users of this technology.
StockTwits
Of course, Twitter brings an enormous amount of noise with its value too. Fortunately, a little start-up called StockTwits has significantly assisted in filtering this noise. Using some simple syntax and aggregation this website and software tool combination is probably one of the best ways to get usable investor relations data to and from active investors, analyst, and financial journalist on Twitter.
Social media and the tools built around these powerful social networks can give your investor relations department a big advantage, assuming you have the ability to efficiently collect and analyze all the cues the open Web feeds you. Social media monitoring is critical to you investor relations team.
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