Investment community brings out IR suite to help companies monitor and engage with investors online
StockTwits, the fast-growing online investment community, today officially launched a suite of services to help companies manage their presence on the site and across other social networks.
The move follows a beta period during which more than 50 companies signed up and began using StockTwits’ corporate services, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, NetApp and CME Group.
The StockTwits IR suite allows companies to take control of their ticker page on the site, which is the page where conversation about that company is aggregated.
Once signed up, a company’s latest message is displayed prominently at the top of its ticker page, so it is not lost in the stream of messages about the issuer from other users of the site.
Any message sent from a verified corporate account also carries a green tick to show users of the site that it is genuine company news.
In addition, the suite enables companies to customize their ticker page, so it can include links to the corporate website, a YouTube channel or SlideShare presentations.
Other features of the suite include a ‘social dashboard’ from which companies can monitor in real time any messages about them and also the level of discussion on StockTwits about their ticker.
By signing up, IR departments can take advantage of StockTwits agreements with major finance websites, like Yahoo! Finance and CNNMoney, and professional news services, such as Reuters and Bloomberg Professional.
Messages posted on StockTwits appear in these locations and can also be sent to other social media sites, providing IR departments with a potentially huge audience to distribute their message to free of charge.
It is free to sign up and claim your ticker page for a limited time.
Along with the basic services included in the suite, StockTwits is rolling out premium add-ons over the next 12 months.
The first is a compliance add-on that enables companies to append disclaimers to messages and links to third-party sites. This add-on is available for $99 a month.
The hope is this add-on will allay the fears of IROs who view social media as a potential compliance minefield.
‘StockTwits received feedback from our beta testers’ legal teams that they wanted ways to add disclaimers and forward-looking statements to messages, so we built the social compliance upgrade to help address compliance concerns with social media,’ says Chris Bullock, vice president of corporate solutions at the site, in an email.
