Bloomberg first integrated Twitter feeds on the trader desktop in April last year, providing users with tools to track companies on Twitter and look out for volume spikes.

But knowing a topic is trending isn't always enough for investors. The real question is: why is this topic important? Is the rise of interest in a company positive, negative, or neutral?

To answer that, Bloomberg has now added social sentiment analytics using algorithms developed by a team of PhDs, product managers and R&D professionals that incorporate statistical models and years of Twitter history.

Users can set up an alert to watch, for example, all of the tickers in the S&P 500 and be alerted to those with significantly positive or negative social sentiment. The terminal monitors the flow of tweets about each stock and triggers an alert whenever sentiment crosses a particular threshold. From there, subscribers can see the overall volume of tweets and the mix of positive, negative and neutral comments, and can click their way to individual Twitter postings, which are available directly through the terminal.

Brian Rooney, Bloomberg's head of product for news, economics and specialised content, says: "Social signals provide another tool for investors to identify trends and events that may move or influence markets. Sentiment analysis helps derive meaning from the stream."

Bloomberg's push into social sentiment analytics follows quickly on the heels of Thomson Reuters, which last month added a new Eikon feature that takes feeds from both Twitter and StockTwits and weights and analyses sentiment using a proprietary methodology.

A charting application gives users a picture of the volume of positive and negative tweets surrounding any given listed company as well as advanced technical analysis which enables them to potentially spot market and company-impacting events as they happen.