As it turns out, companies can now do much more with Twitter than just promote their products and services to the masses.
In 2013, the SEC formally acknowledged that companies are allowed to communicate news through their Twitter feeds, as long as their investors are aware of it.
This shift has prompted Thomas Reuters to generate sentiment analysis that is utilized for their Eikon market analysis and trading platform.
This partnership with Thomas Reuters is similar to what Bloomberg unsuccessfully tried to achieve last year. The difference is that the Eikon user base is expanding by leaps and bounds on a daily basis. Currently they have over 120,000 people using their service, and that number grows dramatically on a weekly basis.
Eikon allows users to track specific Tweets, or specific people or businesses. Information is then gathered and regurgitated in easy-to-read digital graphs that can be used for a variety of purposes. Econ invested nearly $1 billion in this technology (and has yet to see it fully pay off) but their recent momentum shows things are heading in a promising direction.
While this shift is a major one for the financial industry, many other businesses and industries have been utilizing Twitter for news for the last few years. Currently only about 50% of quantitative firms are using readable feeds and analysis, and most are not easy to interpret by the average Joe, which is where Eikon stands to set itself far ahead of the pack.