Twitter has partnered with social trading and investing platform eToro on Thursday to give users access to real-time prices of stocks, cryptocurrencies and other assets when using the social media network's new $Cashtags feature.
The new features under the partnership expand on Twitter existing $Cashtags service, which allows users to interact with content in contention with an asset by adding a dollar sign in front of a ticker, for example $GOOGL to see news and other content associated with Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL). Twitter has since added pricing data to the service late last year.
According to eToro, there are on average 4.7 million $Cashtag searches a day, with activity often increasing during earnings announcement from popular public companies. The most commonly used $Cashtag was $TSLA representing Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) news, with symbols for SPDR S&P 500 ETF (NYSE: SPY) and Bitcoin among the top five most searched, eToro said.
Now, $Cashtag users will be able to access eToro's platfrom from Twitter to see more information about a chosen asset, and are giving the option to invest. This comes at a time that increased use of $Cashtags becomes a growing trend amongst Twitter users engaging with financial content. There were about 498 million tweets about business and finance globally throughout the first 90 days of 2023, according to eToro, with the majority of these tweets coming from users in the 18-34 age range.
"Financial content on social media has provided education to many who have felt excluded by more traditional channels. Twitter has become a crucial part of the retail investing community -- it's where millions of ordinary investors go every day to access financial news, share knowledge and converse," said Yoni Assia, CEO and co-founder of eToro, in a release.
Since acquing Twitter for $44 billion in October, CEO Elon Musk has made a series of changes to the platform, including introducing a subscription-based model for verified users for $8 per month, with notable features like adding a blue checkmark to their profile and increasing the visibility of their tweets.
Called Twitter Blue, the company has now expanded the subscription plan to offer users the ability to tweet up to 10,000 characters in a single tweet that will support the use of bold and italic formatting. Twitter's previous limit was 280 characters. The service is also expanding its monetization options, allowing users to subscribe to content creators in exchange for subscriber-only content.
Musk said on Thursday that for the next 12 months, Twitter will not take a portion of the subscriber payments to content creators.
"You will receive whatever money we receive, so that's 70% for subscriptions on iOS & Android (they charge 30%) and ~92% on web (could be better, depending on payment processor)," Musk tweeted. "After first year, iOS & Android fees drop to 15% and we will add a small amount on top of that, depending on volume. We will also help promote your work. Our goal is to maximize creator prosperity."
Musk has already launched a subscription tier for his own account, charging users $4 per month to view his private Tweets.