It took a while for social media to infect financial vertical, but once it caught on, it gained momentum quickly. Social lending sites like Kiva got a ton of press; the social news site for finance, Tip’d, grew like a weed; and now that Twitter’s all the rage, we’re seeing some new money-themed Twitter-based services attract a userbase: StockTwits and Twiticker.
Let’s be clear about one thing though: while peer-to-peer lending sites like Kiva and informational sites like Tip’d cater to all sorts of investors–especially the diversified, buy-and-hold, long-term-view kind–Twitter’s very nature attracts bursty, instantaneous, and fleeting content. And that means, buy-and-hold investors might not find these new platforms interesting. Day traders, on the other hand, seem to be flocking to them.
The question is, which platform should you make your home? With most social media channels, you find a winner-take-all situation. (Why sign up at register at ConnectU, when everyone’s already signed up at Facebook?) So let’s take a look at these two platforms head-to-head, and see which is likely to come out the winner.
Twiticker
Twiticker’s byline is “What are the markets doing?” The site’s homepage features the latest finance-related tweets, though I can’t tell what kind of engine/algorithm they’re using to find and sort the tweets. My impressions of the site are positive, however I can’t help but feel like it’s an Alpha product, not quite ready for primetime. In fairness, Twiticker is promising a revamp in the near future: “We are very excited to announce that Doug Williams has joined Twiticker.com as President. Doug will move Twiticker from an aggregator of stock information into a more robust and consumable hub of financial data. Doug will bring his twelve years of development experience to the team where he will lead business and functional growth.”
- Traffic: A report from Compete.com shows about 1,000 monthly unique visitors. Ouch.
- Press: A Google search brings up coverage from Tweetcrunch and not a whole lot else.
- Features: The site seems like it’s 90% finished, but still needs a little polishing.
StockTwits
Stocktwits launched with greater fanfare, possibly due to co-founder Howard Lindzon’s reputation built at Wallstrip. The site describes itself as “an open, community-powered investment idea and information service. You can think of it as Bloomberg for the little guy and gal. Eavesdrop on what traders and investors are talking about RIGHT NOW or contribute to the conversation and build your reputation and following as a savvy market wizard.”
- Traffic: A report from Compete.com shows about 40,000 monthly unique visitors. Not huge yet, but growing, and not exponentially lower than the traffic levels seen at social finance plays Tip’d and Stockpickr, which have achieved critical mass. (Disclosure: Bankling management has an ownership interest in Tip’d.) In any case, the traffic level is about 3,900% higher than that of Twiticker.
- Press: StockTwits came out with an impressive PR-blitz last Fall. Coverage on WSJ’s The Wallet, NYT’s Bits Blog and even Mashable.
- Features: StockTwits was able to raise $800k in funding, and it looks like they’re making that go far in terms of development. The site is very polished and usable, and they even have a “Digg-style” user-request application, so it’s likely the most coveted feature requests will get implemented in the future.
So which platform should you use?
If I were a betting man, I’d say StockTwits is likely to get to 50,000 users first… and whichever service gets to 50k first will probably get to 500,000 users first… you get the picture. Of course, should Twitter enter this space with an in-house app, they could monopolize the space easily, but I don’t see that as a high probability. For now, I’d say if you’re going to sign up at only one, you’ll probably want to check StockTwits out first.
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