SmartMoney.com is reporting that Twitter, a site originally best known for tracking the musings of celebrities and sports stars, is catching on with an unexpected new demographic: the serious investor.
The site is essentially a vast shared blog where anybody can broadcast short messages, or “tweets,” about anything–and where anybody can follow the commentary of anyone whose opinions interest them.
And with fast-growing frequency, corporate titans, professional stock?pickers, passionate financial amateurs and, yes, the media (including SmartMoney) are using the site to swap bite-sized commentary and information about investing and financial strategy.
It all adds up to a blizzard of new information for investors to shovel their way through. The investing and finance news feeds on Twitter are cranking out at least 8,000 investment-related tweets every day–an average of one every 11 seconds.
StockTwits, one of the biggest stock-trading news services on Twitter, has gained 98,000 followers since it launched late in 2008 and is now adding roughly 9,000 each month.
People who combine financial know-how with celebrity have an even bigger foothold; for example, more than a million people follow the “SuzeOrmanShow” feed. “The growth is completely wild,” says Howard Lindzon, cofounder and CEO of StockTwits.
What’s perhaps more surprising is who’s making up the audience. Although most tech analysts assumed Twitter would appeal only to young people accustomed to texting, it turns out that relative oldsters are big fans, too–45 percent of visitors to Twitter are over 35, and 17 percent are over 50, according to market researcher Quantcast. Nobody yet has studied the average net worth of Twitter users, but the service is picking up fans among well-to-do professionals.
Photo by SmartMoney.