Bloomberg brings Twitter to the Street

Bloomberg users can now access financial news and views in real time as the firm integrates Twitter feeds for the first time. The move comes after the SEC announced earlier this week that companies can use social media for corporate disclosures.

‘When important news is shared on Twitter, traders and investors need to be able to access it and validate its importance in order to incorporate that information into their decision-making process,’ says Jean-Paul Zammitt, head of sales and product development for the Bloomberg Professional service, in a statement.

The firm explains that by incorporating Twitter feeds into its own financial information service and users’ existing workflow, Bloomberg Professional subscribers can ‘avoid the disruption caused by monitoring separate systems for different types of market-moving information.’

Bloomberg classifies tweets by company, asset class, person and topic, allowing Bloomberg Professional users of the TWTR<GO> service to ‘create filters and alerts, monitor which companies are trending, or set alerts for increased levels of social media activity,’ explains the company. The personalized Twitter feeds will then be incorporated into the service that also brings together corporate announcements and content from around 90,000 websites and 1,000 news organizations.

Karl Braasch, fund manager and co-founder of Bristlecone Capital Partners, talks of the increasing relevance of social media for the financial community. ‘We recognize the rapidly growing importance of social media as a means for companies to release important, market-moving information,’ he says in the Bloomberg press statement.

Until this week’s announcement by the SEC, US firms had no clear guidelines on the use of social media, and communicating with investors via Twitter or Facebook could land them in hot water with Reg FD – despite the huge numbers of users accessing information through these channels. While some of the confusion may have been cleared up this week, however, many commentators expect companies to remain shy about testing this new ground.