Investors are awake to the importance of social media as a source of data on which to make investment decisions. A number of papers have alluded to this, including a recent report from Greenwich Associates, which said the phenomenon was seen as an alternative data source but would soon become established in investors' research toolkits. The study found that investors were more likely than non-investors to use Twitter and Facebook for research, with those who used them most often being those who had been previously active users or followers of these sites.
Investors are awake to the importance of social media as a source of data on which to make investment decisions. A number of papers have alluded to this, including a recent report from Greenwich Associates, which said the phenomenon was seen as an alternative data source but would soon become established in investors' research toolkits. The sheer volume of data available will require some taming and it will be important in future for investors to adopt sophisticated filtering strategies to screen out noise.