Reuters Money

The following is a guest post by Brad Allen. The opinions expressed are his own.

Twitter is not just for staying in touch with friends and colleagues. It’s becoming a great way for keeping up with the stocks you care about as well. And companies themselves are increasingly using the social media tool to communicate directly with investors.

Ever since the $TICKER tag was introduced on Twitter two years ago, active traders and investors have used the 140 character message stream to share tips, ideas and news. As the number of participants discussing specific stocks has grown, so has the volume of tweets touting penny stocks, newsletters — and the occasional bogus “news release” trying to move a stock.

Most companies whose stocks were the subject of those tweets ignored the chatter the same way they ignore online chat rooms. Worried about inadvertent selective disclosures, corporate spokespeople kept their own Twitter conversation focused on routine PR matters, and steered away from financial and investor information.

That is changing fast as companies figure out how to tweet without crossing the foul line. A recent study of more than 600 public companies using social media found that two-thirds of them employ Twitter to communicate directly with investors, up dramatically from two years ago when just a handful were starting to tweet.

The study, conducted by Q4 Web Systems, a Toronto-based consulting firm that advises corporations on using the web, reported that natural resources and tech companies represent the greatest number investor-tweeting companies, followed by services, industrials, basic materials, and retail companies.

The survey cited emerging “best practices” these companies use when tweeting investors, including:

• live tweeting during earnings conference calls, analyst investor days and annual meetings;
• reaching out to investors for questions prior to an earnings call;
• answering investor questions live for all to see;
• linking to breaking news, analyst reports and opinions on the company or the industry;
• inviting followers to webcasts, conference calls and video blogs;
• using unique #HASHTAGS for specific events to make them easier to find later.

So what’s the best way to follow your favorite stocks on Twitter? Here are some easy guidelines and examples of companies that are embracing the technology.

First, check the company’s investor relations website to see if you can sign up to follow them on Twitter. Some companies will send notification of all media releases, others will send investor-specific information.

See if your company is on StockTwits.com, a microblog site for investors that introduced the $TICKER tag two years ago. StockTwits recently launched a service for companies to “claim” their ticker or another handle on the site. That way, readers will know that the tweet is from the company.

StockTwits also monitors the content of its site to keep out garbage such as spam, penny stock solicitations and offensive language. Messages posted to StockTwits get more broadly distributed, not only to Twitter but to investor news sites such as Reuters, Yahoo Finance, CNN Money and Bing Finance. Bloomberg terminals also include StockTwit’s messages right on traders’ desks.

Even if your watch list companies have not claimed their tickers on StockTwits, you can plug in your favorite $TICKER or a company designated handle to keep up with the latest news on the company. One word of caution: if the company has not claimed the $TICKER, be aware that anybody can tweet what they like, so don’t assume what you see is from the company itself.

Here is a sample of the kinds of investor-targeted information you can find from some of the companies highlighted in the Q4 Web study.

Dell (@dellshares) and eBay (@ebayinkblog) are good examples of companies that “live tweet” during their quarterly conference calls with investors, sending out ten to thirty tweets during the call. Dell also invites questions prior to its earnings call and uses specific hashtags like “#dellearnings” to make it easier to find that event later.

Hewlett Packard (@hpnews) tweets lots of new product announcements, but also information you wouldn’t find elsewhere. Case in point: When they sued Oracle over a business dispute, Hewlett Packard did not issue a press release but issued a comment via Twitter instead.

Royal Dutch Shell (@rdsa) linked investors to newly issued analyst reports, both upgrading and downgrading the stock.

Johnson and Johnson (@JNJComm) tweeted throughout its annual meeting as it was happening live.

And it’s not just big companies that are tweeting. Smaller companies use the social media channel as a way to reach a larger audience. PGi, an Atlanta-based virtual meeting provider (@PGiInvestor) tweets investors questions and answers during earnings conference calls.