TweetSight: Enhancing Financial Analysts' Social Media Use

Abstract

Financial analysts utilize information from heterogeneous sources (e.g. corporate filings, economic indicators, news, and tweets) to generate unique trade ideas through a sensemaking process. In this paper, we seek to understand the role of social media in this process. We conducted a semi-structured interview and identified essential benefits and barriers for the primary social media platform used by the analysts - Twitter. Analysts use Twitter as a query exploration tool, as a bellwether to understand sentiment, and to gauge knock-on effects. Drawing from our findings, we developed four scenarios to guide the design of TweetSight. Finally, we evaluated the design of TweetSight by walking analysts through the prototype. Analysts responded positively to anchoring contextual tweets in news articles to facilitate discovery and exploration of Twitter. Our findings and design implications can be applied more broadly to leverage social media for sensemaking, benefiting various business communities.