Yes, with Twitter you can get the latest celebrity gossip or find out what your friends are doing every minute of the day, but Twitter can also be a terrific source for timely information and news about gold investments. Many individuals and companies tweet about gold prices, owning gold coins and bullion, and investing in gold mining companies. These days, many companies are even using Twitter as a means to communicate directly with their investors.

Originally companies ignored Twitter in the same manner that they ignored online investment chat rooms, assuming that most of the information conveyed there consisted of hype and speculation. But in the past year or so, as Twitter’s influence continues to increase, companies are discovering how useful the social media site can be. Companies now tweet live conversations during investor conference calls as well as links to breaking news or analyst reports. They invite their Twitter followers to attend webcasts and other events, both online and offline.

How to Find Gold News on Twitter

Twitter uses something called “hashtags” to make searching for a subject quicker and easier. In the search bar, you can type in subjects like #gold, #investment, and #investing, and the site will pull up all tweets that include those hashtags, with the most recent tweets on top. The $TICKER symbol is another way to search; this was invented by the investing website StockTwits.com about three years ago, in order to allow people to quickly locate information and ideas about a particular company using its stock market ticker abbreviation. So it can be a simple matter to type “$GLD” into the search function, and you will instantly be presented with a list of the most recent tweets concerning the SPDR Gold Shares ETF.

If you are interested in a particular company, check to see if they have an official Twitter moniker. Add that to your “Following” list, and tweets from it will always appear in your feed.

Specific Gold Investment Twitter Streams

As to which Twitter streams you should follow specifically, there are a handful of large, popular investment websites with extensive presence on Twitter that should be on your list. These include CNBC (@CNBC), DailyFX.com (@DailyFX, @DailyFXTeam), ZeroHedge.com (@zerohedge), and CBS Marketwatch (@marketwatch). These sites provide information on a great variety of investment opportunities, but gold is one of the major categories that they cover.

Investing sites such as Gold Money News (@GoldMoneyNews), The Gold Report (@SWGoldReport), Live Bullion Prices (@GoldMarket), and the Economic Times, India, (@ETGoldNews) provide more targeted news and information about investing in gold.

Other Twitter Streams Regarding Gold

Other Twitter streams you might consider following: @KitcoNewsNow and @OwningGold, which publishes a daily compilation e-newsletter called The Owning Gold Daily.

Several gold mining companies have official Twitter monikers, including Barrick Gold Corp. (@BarrickGold, $ABX), the largest gold mining company in the world. Other large and influential miners include GoldCorp ($GG) and Newmont Mining ($NEM).

For the gold ETFs and Index you can search for the SPDR Gold Shares ETF ($GLD), the Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF ($GDX), and the Philadelphia Exchange Gold/Silver Index ($XAU).

Caveat Emptor

As with all online investing advice, it is best to view anything that does not come from an official source with a healthy sense of skepticism. Twitter is like an online investing chat room, in that anyone can post anything, claiming anything they like. If you find information that intrigues you, be sure to verify it with trustworthy sources before you act upon it.

How to Use Twitter To Monitor Gold Investment News from Daniel Robert, a blogger with a keen interest in personal finance. He now represents Regal Assets a specialist of investing in precious metals.