Forex Social Platforms
By: Hillel Fuld
If you have spent any time on the worldwide Web over the past year, you have surely heard the words “social media”, “Facebook”, and “Twitter” spoken in one context or another. Social media is a hot trend that is taking the marketing and PR worlds by storm.
Forex is also a topic getting a lot of traction lately especially in light of the recent recession. You would think that this growing industry would make use of the various tools at its disposal, yet somehow a Forex social presence is not as strong as it should be. With the introduction of some new Forex communities such as Currensee and OpenBook, this might change in the near future.
Old Spice Campaign
To name one example that is hot out of the oven, Old Spice, a well established deodorant and perfume company, ran a wildly successful social media campaign last week. We have not seen the raw data of sales and how their millions of page views boosted sales numbers, but one thing is for sure. Old Spice made use of the social platforms like no company has done before. They utilized the power of Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and others to raise awareness of their brand by providing real time, highly entertaining, and personalized video responses to all the questions they were sent on the various social networks. Marketers around the globe are still talking about this campaign and will continue to do so well into the future. It is considered to be the new standard of social media marketing.
Forex Trading
To shift your focus to an entirely different world for a second, just like social media is taking the Web and marketing worlds by storm, Forex is taking the financial world by typhoon. The foreign exchange market is the largest financial market by leaps and bounds, but that is not its only unique advantage.
As opposed to many financial markets, nothing is stopping a person from become a Forex trader overnight. Of course it is not recommended to take up trading Forex without studying the market, but in theory, if someone were so inclined, nothing would stand in their way.
Forex Social Presence or Lack Thereof
When it comes to combining the above two fields, Forex and Social Media, that is when things start to get messy. If one were to search Twitter for the word Forex for example, you would find hundreds if not thousands of tweets being posted by spam accounts. These accounts are generally bots who do not have human beings behind the tweets. This is of course pointless and completely misses the whole concept of social media marketing, which is mainly based on the idea of online communication and dialog.
Now that we have established that Forex players have not yet figured out how to maximize the potential of the social Web to promote their products, the question is who suffers from this lack of understanding? The real answer is that everyone involved suffers. The company trying to promote themselves via a bot account will see close to no results. The online community as a whole suffers due to the proliferation of online spam whether it is on Twitter, Facebook, Email, or other tools being utilized by these Forex companies.
However, the biggest loser in this is the trader. Traders are genuinely seeking a solution to integrating a Forex social layer into their trading and with the lack of a real Forex presence on social media, they are being met with a brick wall. Fortunately, in the past few years, several quality platforms have been developed to help achieve this specific goal. Though the first social Forex trading platforms that were developed are no longer active, they certainly paved the way for the plethora of offerings we have today, and their contribution to the industry is worth learning about.
Currensee
Currensee was the first full fledged social network for Forex traders. The currensee community idea is that Forex traders should be able to communicate with other traders in real time, view their trades, and learn from each others' strategies. Currensee built a robust and advanced platform enabling traders to be a part of a very large and widespread Forex community. The Currensee Forex community actually reached an important and ground breaking milestone recently of its one millionth trade and over $30 billion traded.
Currensee was sold to leading Forex broker OANDA in 2013 and was subsequently closed in 2014, but its novel ideas and solid social trading platform have forever changed the trading world.
eToro
eToro was the first Forex broker to open a trading platform that was entirely based upon social trading strategies. Since its launch, the company has become well known for its advanced and user friendly interface as well as the company's ability to truly think out of the box. To say that eToro did not disappoint with their newest product would be an understatement.
eToro's first platform, Open Book did have a lot in common with Currensee; mainly that they both brought the Forex social element to your Forex trading. Nevertheless, the platforms had many differences and eToro managed to add some great unique Forex social features to Open Book.
To just name a few, in order to benefit from the global Open Book Forex community, you did not have to register or sign in to the service, just go to Openbook, follow people, and see what other traders are doing.
The eToro Open Book platform was recently replaced with a new platform, eToro CopyTrader, which is poised to add great value and interest to the social Forex trading industry. As a regulated broker that services hundreds of thousands of traders worldwide, eToro's CopyTrader is a great place for traders to get their feet wet and to try out this unique form of trading.
The world of social Forex trading has advanced significantly since 2010, thanks to companies like Currensee and Etoro. Traders now have dozens of respectable Forex communities they can be a part of and benefit from, when it comes to learning the ropes of Forex trading.
To get started in the world of social Forex trading, check out some of today's top social platforms, eToro's CopyTrader and Tradeo.