Social Media Stock Market: A Possibility?

The Internet serves billions of users all over the world, it has given birth to a whole new world of possibilities. Gone are the days where we need to communicate using hard phones or snail mail. Researching inside a library packed with real books is almost a thing of the past.

With the increase and rampant use of the World Wide Web, it has enabled and accelerated new forms of human interaction through forums, instant messaging, and social networking. It is now the primary source of consumer, academic, business, public, private and government information.

The voice of the customer

Business owners have learned to use social media as one of their avenues to market their products and services. More and more businesses are putting up their own Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts to be able to reach out to the millions of consumers connected through these social media networks.

Through these networks, today’s consumers have the freedom to express their sentiments, thoughts and views on a recent purchase they made, or on a service they recently had done. Positive and negative feedback would ultimately play a big role on how other potential customers would see or view that specific product or service.

Instant feedback, viewable by almost everyone on the Internet had most businesses improve their customer service and increase customer satisfaction. Satisfaction rating is now the focal point of almost all businesses. Improvements in their processes and policies have been re-drafted to coincide with the ever evolving demands from their customers.

Predicting the Stock Market

For years, analysts have been trying to perfect a tool to predict stock market movements. If predicted correctly, a business can earn billions of dollars. Let’s take a quick look at the traditional ways how analysts trend the stock scene.

Long Term Valuation –This form of analysis makes use of extensive knowledge about the company’s earnings, management, industry performance, projected sales volume and other financial metrics.

Price to Earnings Ratios (P/E) – Is the market price per share relative to annual earnings per share? By analyzing P/E ratio one can conclude the market’s stock value and the actual income that the company is earning.

Social market movement

One thing that is could compare to the Internet’s size is the Stock Market. Estimated to be about 11 times the size of the entire world economy, it is where most businesses have the capacity to trade their shares or ownership of their company to finance business expansion. It is about people driving the market.

Consumer patterns can be used to analyze and dictate market movements. Social media is a good indicator of future revenues. Why? This is where businesses get opinions straight from the customers. They can gather information relatively important to boost their sales. They get information on how their competitor’s products perform and they can innovate and make that performance better for their product or service.

In the world of social media, say for example, in Twitter, when one popular person tweets about a product that he or she is advertising, inquiries, website traffic and sales for that product increases. Increase in sales means more profit for the business, more profit leads to a more competitive share value. Another good example of a social networking site that drives traffic and sales to a website is Pinterest. Take Discount Queens for example. Since they know which market archetype they cater to, which is mostly women, they are active in a social site that most women are active in, therefore gaining much needed traction to their products and pages on their site.

Indicated on the image:

The encircled red highlight shows a “hashtag” on the word coupon for an added traction on other social sites (such as Twitter and Google +)
Arrow points to the recent number of ‘re-pins’ (for tracking)
Lower left red box show the number of pins, likes, activities on their account (for research)
Lower right red box indicate the total number of followers they have (for statistical data on reach)

Branded products have social networking sites dedicated to them. Some of these were created by the company itself, and some by their avid followers. This is a cost efficient way to advertise their products and services, since they are literally one click away from their followers. This is also a great venue for them to collect consumer thoughts, insights and suggestions, whether positive or negative, as to what they can do better to service their customers.

Socialize your stocks

Twitter lets you share your opinion, sentiments and knowledge to just about anyone who has a Twitter account. They can follow your opinion 24/7. This is a great venue for market players to share their view points on how a stock will trend for the minute, hour, day, week or month. The value of social media is that it’s not just for the experts in the field; it also encourages the general public to air their thoughts about the topic at hand.

There have been propositions to try and analyze market data using Twitter. Industry experts say that tweets can be used to predict market behavior. The difficulty lies in trying to synthesize and filter the “unwanted” data that comes along with tweets and comments.

The application of the correct technology to filter data, analyze it, and spew out trends and business movements will invariably help traders, brokers and players, to not only predict market movement, but also dictate stock trends.

To be able to finally trend ‘social media stock market’ performance data is an innovative and smart approach. The huge number of statistical data, an array of ideas, and the abundance of information can be used to build or design a tool to finally put an end to the erratic way the market has been performing.

Social Media: Traversing global spheres

Social media creates a pool of knowledge from all over the world. It does not only concentrate on one expert in one geographical location, it actually encourages all the experts from all over the world to give their two cents on a specific topic. What’s better is that the general public can join in and give their honest opinion and even learn from what the experts are saying.

The challenge faced by innovators is how to put that sense of “finality” on a given topic, especially in the social media scene. It takes careful planning and execution to control bogus posts by someone who misunderstood a given topic; who is maliciously giving a business, product or service some negative publicity; or who wants to steal the scene from an expert.

It is never an easy job to search for a true expert on things. The public does not just want someone with the technical know-how on the stock market scene; they want a professional: someone who knows the job, the scene, and what is required to stay alive in the industry of trading stocks and shares. It would be a better scene if someone out there works out software to find that one good professional, to weed out the best from the handful of better.

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