By Sheila Dang
(Reuters) - What's the value of being Twitter-famous? Two new stock indexes created by S&P Dow Jones Indices and Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) will unravel the mystery on Thursday, measuring the performance of the buzziest companies for investors with an eye on social media influence.
Twitter has long played a central role for investors and traders to share stock tips, keep up with breaking company news and follow the latest musings from CEOs like Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA)'s Elon Musk, who recently polled his 64 million followers on whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla shares.
The S&P 500 Twitter Sentiment Index will measure the performance of the top 200 companies within the S&P 500 that have "the highest sentiment scores," based on how the social network's users are discussing the stocks, said S&P Dow Jones Indices.
The companies within the index will be weighted by market capitalization. A second index will measure the performance of the top 50 companies with equal weight.
The new indexes come as tweets about finance are rising on the San Francisco-based social media site, particularly with the growth of cryptocurrencies. Finance-related conversations were up more than 26% in 2020 from the previous year, Twitter said.
S&P DJI said it will measure the Twitter sentiment of S&P 500 companies on a daily basis by analyzing tweets that contain a "cashtag," a stock ticker feature that works similarly to hashtags, and scoring whether the tweets are more positive or negative. Both indices will be rebalanced monthly.
Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN), JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE:JPM) and Meta Platforms Inc, the new name for Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), will be among the companies in the Twitter Sentiment Index, S&P DJI said, though it declined to provide the full list.