StockTwits, the investor-focused social network, has launched a new service that allows companies to place messages on their Yahoo! Finance stock page.
Until now, companies had no direct control over what appeared on their Yahoo! summary page.
‘Public companies in about three seconds can now send their breaking news or financial news directly to that ticker page and frame it exactly how they and their lawyers want it,’ says Howard Lindzon, co-founder and CEO of StockTwits.
The StockTwits Direct module appears in the right column (Intel’s Yahoo! page)
The service is particularly good for targeting retail investors, says Lindzon, as between 40 percent-50 percent of this group check quotes on Yahoo! Finance.
Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Yahoo! and Royal Dutch Shell are the initial four companies using StockTwits Direct.
The service allows a company to keep up to three messages in a special module on its quote summary page for $1,599 a month, or $19,188 a year. A client can modify or change the stories at any time.
A close-up of the StockTwits Direct module (Intel’s Yahoo! page)
In addition, a company can tap view and click metrics to better gauge how the stories are working.
The information can inform decisions on how different stories or packages of information seem to work with investors.
‘You get a feel for how that site is working for you and what kinds of message they’re looking for,’ Lindzon says.
StockTwits expansion
The service is part of Lindzon’s plan to build revenue streams. ‘About six months ago, we were thinking this through and saying we could sell ads on our site or work with public companies to share their financial releases and other information,’ he says.
The first pay service was StockTwits Enterprise, which gave a $499 a month distribution mechanism for corporate news and information.
Dissemination happens on the StockTwits site – which gets about 150,000 unique users in any given week, according to Lindzon – as well as on other social networks and financial media, including Reuters, CNN Money, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
He claims that 150 companies have signed up to use the Enterprise version over the last two months, which would be nearly $900,000 in annual income.
Although StockTwits Direct has started on Yahoo! Finance, Lindzon is ‘working on’ adding other finance sites.
There is some danger, however. Lindzon admits that StockTwits could become ‘theoretically competitive’ with them, although he says that such services ‘want to work with us or develop products with us’.
