Covestor, a leading investing expert community, recently announced a new feature enabling Twitter integration into its trading platform. According to the company, “When you execute a trade with your broker you can now keep your followers on Twitter up to date, per the other members following you on Covestor.”
Because Covestor and other expert communities thrive not only on investment performance in terms of ranking experts but also incorporate the blogging of trades and the rationale behind them, the twitter will also include a link back to the Covestor site to link up readers with the expert’s trade blog.
Interesting little piece of functionality. It got me thinking about how social networking tools can be further integrated into Covestor and other expert investing networks. In addition to just announcing a trade to an expert’s followers, outside social networks can be co-opted into investing networks like Covestor in some of the following ways:
- extend reach: the scope and reach of some of these expert investment networks is pretty limited (although most of the larger networks like Covestor and Vestopia are syndicating their content using SeekingAlpha and TheStreet.com). Using larger social networks like Facebook and Twitter allows the expert to broaden their exposure and further cement their reputation as an expert.
- fresh meat: expanding reach by co-opting external social networks provides stables and stables of potential new recruits to the investing expert communities. While we shouldn’t expect that everyone has the talent and time to participate in a community, certainly many wouldn’t mind spectating passively on the activity in these communities.
- analytical layer: Imagine an aggregator like SeekingAlpha integrating an analytical overlay onto some of the blogging going on on the site. Now, in addition to well-reasoned and some prolific blogging, readers have a way to judge exactly how well these blog analysts are doing with their suggestions. This would work on SA but also on TheStreet and it’s RealMoney section.
- cross-pollinating experts: this is very interesting to think about. While an expert in Gerson Lehrman‘s expert network may indeed be proven as an expert in investing in retail facilities in the Middle East, he doesn’t carry that same type of clout in a cooking community. When social networks intertwine, we’ll end up seeing some type of expert status portability across communities — some of which will cary cache, while others not. Look to see more narrowly defined expert communities in investing emerge out of sites like Covestor or MarketGuru.
Covestor says that it has some more Twitter integration coming up in the future, so keep your eyes out.
