StockTwits Gets Even More Social, Rolls Out Discovery Tools

It’s been a good start to the year for StockTwits. For starters, as we reported last week, the realtime info-sharing hub for investors and traders, has doubled its monthly visitors since December. It also recently stole Yahoo Finance products exec David Putnam and added Chris Bullock, who was formerly the senior managing director for global investor relations services at NASDAQ, as its new VP of Corporate Services.

Today, the information service announced further developments, saying that it will be rolling out a series of discovery tools to allow its users to more easily find people to follow within its growing community.

To begin with, StockTwits is launching a full page (vertical) dedicated to this social discovery (which you can see above) that members can use to search for traders, investors, and more. You can then filter the results, defining specific attributes you want to search for, like “Suggested List” status, approach to market, holding period, asset class, and investor relations. This means that members can more easily locate, say, a long-term equities analyst to advise them on whether or not they should buy a certain ETF.

StockTwits has also added a widget to each of its stream pages, which serves users with suggestions on who to follow. It bases these suggestions on the attributes you define in your profile and who you’re already following. The more people you follow, the better suggestions it serves.

And let’s not forget the widget. On each user profile, the service has added a widget to show profiles that are similar to the one you’re currently viewing. In all, these discovery updates are not dissimilar to LinkedIn’s discovery mechanisms, like the “Viewers of this profile also viewed…” box, or the “People You May Know” discovery feature.

If you’ve never used StockTwits, but are familiar with those ubiquitous stock tickers, then you can think of StockTwits as a ticker for the social aspect of stock tracking. Instead of tracking an individual stock’s rise and fall, the service tracks the social data around each stock — who’s discussing the stock and what they’re saying. This allows you to locate the traders, analysts, etc. whom you trust, add them to the list of people you follow, and track them as they make predictions or chat about investments, trades, deals, and so on.

But maybe you have a stock in mind, but aren’t sure whether you should invest. StockTwits’ new discovery tools make it easy to select the type of traders or analysts that would be discussing your prospective stock, follow them, and join the conversation. Pretty cool.

And as I wrote last week, quite a few companies have started using the service to disseminate information among investors and to answer their questions, so, again, social discovery tools that can help you more easily find your colleagues or your company’s financial advisors adds to the service’s overall appeal. Especially in the investor relations sector, which will be a big area for StockTwits going forward.