What I have learned from StockTwits

My previous post has briefly mention how StockTwits is pioneering a powerful new community model. There are actually more learning points to that. I want to share what I have observed from using the service and looking at its growth and strategies. StockTwits is pioneering something important and we can all learn from it.

Leveraging on abundance of content but scarcity in wisdom
Stocktwits has very smartly avoided being another platform for content production. We have already too much of that. What we need and what StockTwits has provided is wisdom. They have used a very elegant tagging system to intelligently filter content from Twitter.

Letting business model 'happen'
The blogging platform it has created lets the talent have a stage to do their thing. (Note: this platform is different from other content producing platforms because of the quality of the bloggers). Where the money will come from is not too certain. They may come from subscriptions, advertisements, sponsorships or some new models etc. That is not important. The critical thing here is to let things happen. Let the people at the edge create the models. Key question is how to bring the edge back to the core?
More efficient model for talent identification
What StockTwits is doing in terms of identifying and promoting talent is not new. Publishers and music labels have been doing that for a while i.e. signing up artists. What is revolutionary is the low cost and bottoms up model they have deployed. This has effectively stripped out the inefficiencies as well as the risk of talent spotting.


I really liked how the StockTwits model works. I think it has potentially to be used in many other verticals, of which healthcare is one possibility. I am sure there are other things we can learn. Why not share them in the comments?

Posted in: idea generation,microblogging