Lebron's twitter feed is a slam dunk for investors

He put up a triple-double on Monday night, managing a win in game two of the NBA finals even without his team's other two best players – so you'll have for forgive LeBron for not tweeting much lately. 

When he's not in the heat of the playoffs, though, King James does plenty of tweeting. And, believe it or not, LeBron's tweets can help you beat the market.

Don't believe me? Just take a look at the companies behind the brands and products that LeBron mentions most often:

Those stocks – $NKE, $AAPL, $STRZA, $KO, $GCI, $DIS, $GIS, $HAS, and $VIAB – did very well this year. 

In fact, the KING JAMES 9 returned 18.84% over the past 52 weeks. That's more than double the growth of the S&P 500 (7.25%). 

Not quite as close as game 2 of the NBA Finals, is it? LeBron joins a growing list of Twitter users who seem to know something that top fund managers don't. 

Uh oh– Steph Curry's LikeFolio beats Lebron in another tough matchup…

Of course, social volume – the amount that a company is mentioned on Twitter – isn't the only thing to look at. Social sentiment data, which is available through TD Ameritrade's Social Signals tab, is also vital. 

Nike is willing to pay for tweets from big names like LeBron, whose endorsement deal gives Nike the number one spot on his graph above, because a tweet from LeBron is good advertising. 

But, of course, LeBron is not the only one on Twitter talking about the brand.

Social sentiment looks at all tweets about Nike, giving a broader picture of what Twitter users (the vast majority of whom are not on Nike's payroll) think of the brand. Positive tweets about Nike act both as advertising and as feedback, and social sentiment gives investors a simple and compelling measure of both.

It's that kind of insight into the brands and products that are trending on Main Street that gives us our edge on Wall St!

–Andy Swan is the founder of LikeFolio, which searches all of Twitter for important shifts in consumer behavior around the brands owned by publicly-traded companies.