Twitception: How Twitter's bad earnings leak proved Twitter data's value

Last week, Twitter proved its value as a real-time data source for investors as it inadvertently leaked poor earnings news about….Twitter ($TWTR).

The Twitception.  Let me explain.

On Tuesday last week, the Nasdaq screwed up and inadvertently published Twitter's earnings report, leaving it public for just 45 seconds during the trading day.

That was long enough for a company called Selerity to scrape the site, capture the data and then tweet it out:

After just a few minutes, word of the leak was starting to spread on Twitter.

That's when LikeFolio's systems calculated that something significant was going on with Twitter, and began pushing out a high volume of tweets about the leaked earnings to investors:

As you can see, the LikeFolio API was able to use this Twitter data to deliver publicly available (not insider) information to TD Ameritrade clients via their innovative social signals tab.

More importantly, this information was delivered to investors before traditional news outlets or even Twitter itself had commented, giving those utilizing social data a tremendous edge on the rest of the market.  Incidentally, real-time distribution of content is one of the key differentiators between Twitter and Facebook, which takes a slower curation approach.

About 10 minutes later, the stock was halted, and then reopened 20% lower than it was from when social data started delivering the leaked earnings information.

Twitception indeed.  

— The LikeFolio API is available to institutional trading firms, financial applications, media companies, and innovative online brokers like TD Ameritrade who wish to deliver unique social content & market data to their clients.