Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2013 as news from early April 2013, covering the Cyprus banking crisis, SEC guidance on social media and Bloomberg’s Twitter integration. Its closing line looks ahead to Twitter’s stock market debut in November 2013; the company was taken private in 2022 and has since been renamed X.
In recent weeks, Twitter has gained weight on Wall Street. As Cyprus was collapsing, the way to get fast, accurate information about what was going on was through this microblogging network, and the power of the information we can get through Twitter is now being officially recognised.
This very week, the SEC ruled that investors and companies should be able to communicate through social media, so companies have been allowed to publish their quarterly results on the various social networks. Remember the controversy over the recent Netflix case, when the company published a preview of its results on Facebook and its share price shot up, catching by surprise many investors who did not follow the company on Facebook and were waiting for the results to come out through traditional channels.
Bloomberg has fully integrated its terminal with Twitter: investors can now use it to select an industry, market or company and gather all the information circulating about it on Twitter. The platform lets you see which companies are gaining prominence over the course of the day (for better or worse), based on the volume of tweets each company generates.
Wall Street analysts and listed companies have welcomed the news and are tweeting more than ever. One company that is not pleased is Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s company, which has called this romance between social media and Wall Street a “disservice” to investors.
It is a complaint that comes too late, since the SEC has decided that the information shared on Twitter is available to anyone who wants it, and it reaches everyone at the same time (retail and institutional investors alike). So if you manage a listed company, Twitter will tell you what investors and analysts are saying about your company, and if you are an investor, Twitter will tell you what the company and analysts are communicating in real time.
And if you are Twitter, congratulations: you are on a roll, and news and developments like these will count in your favour the day Twitter goes public.
Featured image: Travis Wise, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
