The Twitter Stock Market

There’s something very interesting offered by Twitter, and it’s right in front of our eyes.

The other day I was thinking about the opportunity Twitter offers to marketing. Every minute -every second really- people post their thoughts, feelings, and actions on Twitter. These feelings are posted for the world to see (okay, so I am ignoring the fact that there are user access settings where a profile can be created private, but we will roll with it). From these feelings, Twitter does something amazing. It tracks the top “feelings” shared by users across the globe- and separates this information down to countries and cities. Watching these posts is sort of like watching the stock minute. One moment #thingsidoathome is trending, the next minute #agedpickles has taken the lead. During times like social revolutions in countries and Hollywood awards shows, it’s extremely obvious at the effectiveness and intrigue these trending words provide. It almost becomes a guessing game: when will Bieber finally get off the trending list? How has he been trending so long? (Trust me, I asked myself this before- and it actually bothered me! It just goes to show you the emotional pull social media provides.)

This got me thinking: who is taking advantage of this information? Are companies taking advantage of this information? Is somebody tailoring their marketing minute by minute based on these trends?

Think of what marketing would be like if we could take a trending word (such as #ifihadanickeleverytime) and create a TV commercial, publicity stunt, or viral video about it? Would this be worthwhile? Would results come from this? Is the world moving this fast yet?

It might not be possible today, but for now, I am banking that in the future the stock of marketing with information from social media will skyrocket. It hasn’t quite reached its full potential (or understanding for that matter) just quite yet, but in the future, it’s something we’ll all have to consider.

– Bryan Nagy