Online brokerage TradeKing, looking to boost its social networking efforts, this week announced that it will provide a month of free trading to users of its online community whose content is determined to be most useful to others.
The company this week also announced plans to upgrade the social community, which it launched in 2005 to provide leads for its customers.
For example, users can now attach "mini-blog" commentary to specific trade notations, or learn about successful traders through a new "All Star Blog" where industry experts comment on the trading strategies of community members. Finally, the company has added a "groups" feature to the online community, where those users with common interests can congregate and share investing strategies.
The contest to find the best user-generated content starts this month with votes by community members to select three top-rated posts about specific trades and three top-rated blog posts. The community will also select the overall top-rated community member - who garners the most combined voted for top blog post and trade notes.
The winners will receive unlimited free options and equities trades in March, said Don Montanaro, the company's CEO.
"[We've] taken the solitary pursuit of independent investing and turned it into a social pursuit," he noted. "You no longer have to feel alone because you now have cohorts who you can collaborate with. It is just really becoming a really vibrant spot where Main Street research meets Wall Street research."
Montanaro said the community now has about 7,000 users, up from 2,500 last summer. Because the community operates on the same site as the trading tool itself, the company can keep its users on the site longer, he added.
In addition, unlike other online investor forums that allow anonymous users, members are TradeKing customers who must register with their real names. Thus, other users know that the people they may be taking advice from are real traders, he added. "They don't have to bounce from using whatever trading platform they might like to use over to a community ... to try to infuse their decision-making process with information from other folks," Montanaro said.
The online community strategy is beginning to pay off, he added, noting that clients who are active in the community tend to generate twice the number of trades, and twice the revenue, than customers that don't participate, he added.
"I place a high value on the ideas and comments from my fellow traders in the TradeKing community because I know their agenda is the same as mine -- we just want to make smart trades," said TradeKing community user "Will Profit", in a statement. "I believe I get a more complete picture of what's happening at any given moment in the market. There is just an amazingly rich amount of information buried in the individual trader and TradeKing gives you a way to access and learn from it."
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