The amount of valuable social content surrounding the stock market is rapidly increasing. Dow Jones MarketWatch capitalized on this opportunity by exploring the intersection between social media and the stock market with the launch of Earnings Wall, a social hub for readers to follow and discuss noteworthy earnings reports. Powered by Livefyre, the interactive Earnings Wall allows users to track and share opinions about earnings reports, all in real-time. The MarketWatch Earnings Wall features social chatter about the top upcoming announcements, hand-picked by MarketWatch editors. Each company featured on the Earnings Wall also has a real-time conversation thread, giving readers the opportunity to weigh in on earnings results, the latest headlines and pulses about a company as well as real-time tweets and commentary from MarketWatch editors and reporters. A first for financial news, the Earnings Wall features editorial and social content related to MarketWatch’s “Stocks to Watch" weekly feature. Livefyre enables RSS feeds of editorial content about these stocks to stream into the hub in real-time, as well as real-time social content tagged with specific “cash tags" (hashtags with $ to denote financial info). This gives users an instant snapshot of all the conversation and information surrounding each featured company. Each company featured on the Earnings Wall also has its own conversation thread, so users can easily share their own opinions before and after the results come in. They can comment directly on the page, or share their opinions out to social networks. Since launching on October 7, Earnings Wall has spotlighted earnings results from more than 160 companies and raked in more than 2 million page views from nearly 600,000 unique visitors. The Wall surpassed more than 1.5 million page views in its first 30 days, making it one of the most successful product launches at MarketWatch in several years.
