StockTwits hires Yahoo! Finance exec as traffic surges

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STOCKTWITS, the investor-focused microblogging service that is attracting a growing number of investor relations users, has hired an executive from Yahoo! Finance to lead product development as traffic to the service has more than doubled in the past three months.

David Putnam joining StockTwits

David Putnam, who for the past five years has been responsible for global product strategy and management for the largest finance website in the world will join StockTwits April 1 as Vice President of Products. In a blog post, Putnam said: “StockTwits is big, getting bigger, and going to be huge.”

His appointment comes just weeks after StockTwits appointed Chris Bullock, former senior managing director for global investor relations services at NASDAQ, as its new Vice President of Corporate Services. His focus is on bringing investor relations departments to the StockTwits community.

“We’re superbly excited about the expertise that David and Chris are bringing to StockTwits,” says CEO Howard Lindzon. “We’re experiencing huge interest in StockTwits and these hires show that we are serious about building an outstanding service.”

Quality of community

StockTwits has seen its traffic surge in recent months. According to Quantcast, StockTwits is now reaching more than 465,000 people a month, up from less than 200,000 at the beginning of December.

However, Lindzon points out that StockTwits has never been concerned with the number of users it has, preferring to focus on building a high quality community.

“We actively monitor StockTwits for penny stock spammers and other undesirable elements and are constantly removing them,” he says.

Investor relations is a key market for StockTwits. A growing number of companies have begun using the service to distribute information to investors and answer their questions.

A major attraction of  StockTwits for IR departments is that it provides distribution of companies’ messages to Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, CNN Money and Bing Finance. This added distribution reduces Reg FD risks for companies and their executives.

In a recent interview with IR Web Report, Sean O’Brien, Senior Vice President of Strategy & Communications at PGi (NYSE: PGI), said the quality of the StockTwits community was a key factor in his company choosing to use the service.

(Disclosure: I have in the past advised StockTwits on its IR services, but do not have a current consulting arrangement with the company.)

Dominic Jones

Dominic (bio & disclosures) is IR Web Report‘s founder and an online investor relations consultant. He advises leading public companies and investor relations service providers worldwide on using the web for disclosure, engagement and profile building. You can contact him via the contacts page.