Stocks with Most Twitter Mentions

Since investing involves doing as much research as possible, it's not surprising that investors should take to Twitter to follow the latest news and updates on the stocks they’re considering.

Even though you can’t predict that stock market (but wouldn’t that be nice?) there is a study that revealed an algorithm could be used to “financially exploit tweets,” according to the Financial Times.

Johan Bollen and Huina Mao of Indiana University discovered there was a direct connection between how the calmness of Twitter and the Dow’s movement. The calmer people were, the more likely the Dow would rally. And in the middle of the Recession, they predicted the direction of the Dow, two to six days in advance, with 87.6% accuracy.

Even if you don’t have all the fancy equipment to process millions of tweets at once, the platform can be a good source of information simply by following posts about the company in which you’re interested.

Bloomberg has ranked the stocks that had the most Twitter postings in May. It looked at posts for U.S. common stocks that contained the $ and the ticker. To determine the legitimacy of a post, Bloomberg considered correlation with news from reputable news organizations, number of messages from a curated set of Twitter users, distribution of postings according to users and distribution of postings according to time of day.

The top two most mentioned stocks left the rest of the top 10 in the dust when it came to how many Twitter postings they had.

Symbol: LNKD

Industry: Internet

Closing price (7/1/13): $183.12

Market cap: $19 billion

Postings in May: 8,269

Change over April: 97.7%

One-month return: -12.79%

One-year return: 74.33%

9. Netflix

Symbol: NFLX

Industry: Internet

Closing price (7/1/13): $224.28

Market cap: 12.1 billion

Postings in May: 8,648

Change over April: -46.7%

One-month return: 4.71%

One-year return: 256.64%

Amazon.com

8. Vringo

Symbol: VRNG

Industry: Telecommunications

Closing price (7/1/13): $3.09

Market cap: $246 million

Postings in May: 8,781

Change over April: -27.5

One-month return: 10.99%

One-year return: -17.41%

Symbol: MSFT

Industry: Software

Closing price (7/1/13): $34.36

Market cap: $290 billion

Postings in May: 9,821

Change over April: -22.3%

One-month return: 6.16%

One-year return: 23.21%

One-year return: 23.21%

CBS Interactive

Symbol: BAC

Industry: Banks

Closing price (7/1/13): $12.92

Market cap: $141.8 billion

Postings in May: 13,022

Change over April: 66%

One-month return: 10.97%

One-year return: 86.43%

Blog.alertsec.com

Symbol: FB

Industry: Internet

Closing price (7/1/13): $24.81

Market cap: $56.8 billion

Postings in May: 21,058

Change over April: 12.6%

One-month return: -12.32%

One-year return: -17.74%

Symbol: GOOG

Industry: Internet

Closing price (7/1/13): $887.89

Market cap: $290.5 billion

Postings in May: 25,452

Change over April: 5.6%

One-month return: 5.66%

One-year return: 49.99%

Google Glass from Google.com

Symbol: BBRY

Industry: Computers

Closing price (7/1/13): $10.28

Market cap: $7.6 billion

Postings in May: 28,445

Change over April: 6.3%

One-month return: -14.33%

One-year return: 35.09%

Symbol: TSLA

Industry: Auto manufacturers

Closing price (7/1/13): $117.18

Market cap: $11.7 billion

Postings in May: 46,534

Change over April: 585.6%

One-month return: 81.07%

One-year return: 231.39%

Tesla.com

Symbol: AAPL

Industry: Computers

Closing price (7/1/13): $409.22

Market cap: $406.3 billion

Postings in May: 69,170

Change over April: -34.9%

One-month return: 2.25%

One-year return: -20.48%

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