Company: CommSec
Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels
Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au)
Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator
CommSec is Australia’s leading online trading platform and a subsidiary of Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank. We introduced CommSec Community in May 2013.
CommSec Community’s goal is simple - to be the largest active investor community in Australia. As a business, we recognized the potential to create a vibrant community where investors and traders can discuss trading strategies and ideas, and a place where those new to trading could learn from each other and feel free to ask questions about entering the market.
Building on the out of the box Lithium platform, we introduced a number of customizations at launch, including:
Automatic Board Assignment
To facilitate a breadth of discussion, our Community has been divided up into a range of boards, including general markets, charting, sections for new and advanced traders and sector specific boards to discuss individual stocks.
To make it easy for users to find the right boards, we created a stock code field in the new post pages which automatically assigns the best board for a post, and turns the stock code into a tag automatically.
Most discussed Stocks
The automatic assignment of a stock code to a tag helps us drive the Most Discussed Stock module that runs across various parts of the site and allows users to get an insight into the stock discussions that are trending over the past 5 days (this time period was set at a period dictated by the community).
This is presented at a Community wide level on general pages and the Community homepage, and at a sector specific level on board relating to areas such as materials and tech stocks.
Stock Sentiment
A further enhancement to the post creation page is the ability to add a sentiment towards a particular stock. This is built on conditional logic, and will only appear if a stock code is added. Users can select one of 5 types of sentiment – buy, accumulate, hold, reduce, sell – depending on their opinion of the stock at that particular time.
We then add this aggregated sentiment to the most discussed stocks to give a rounded picture of the Community’s activity and discussions.
Live Stock Pricing
We have also integrated the ability to buy and sell directly from the discussions.
At the top of stock specific discussions, we have included live pricing information about the stock, covering current price, change, bid and offer, 52 week high and low and volume. From there we offer users the ability to add a stock to their watchlist and alerts, get a detailed quote, as well as buy and sell.
We see the Community as an important piece of the overall research customers should do in deciding what stocks to purchase.
We have integrated the ability to interact with Community from a number of our key areas of the site.
Watchlists:
Quotes and Research:
In the first 12 months, the CommSec Community now has over 10,000 registered users having made nearly 50,000 posts, and another 8,000 active guests who return each week to read the content.
We have seen in excess of 13,500 trading actions commenced from Community – either addition of stocks to watchlists, or quotes, and over 3,000 trades placed via the platform.
