For many market participants, Twitter is the new newsfeed.

The proliferation of social media services such as Twitter and Facebook has exploded in the last two years as individuals continue to become more public and transparent in the way they communicate with each other.

The grip of social media has entered the trading landscape in full swing, with services like StockTwits providing aggregation and platforms for traders to use to share investment ideas.

“At firm58, we have a Twitter account that we’ll use to communicate with our community and customers. We also blog and use instant messaging as well,” Nick Fera, chief executive officer of firm58, said at the Markets Media Chicago Trading and Investing Summit.

The ability to stream useful information and trading ideas with one another is wonderful, but the ability to intelligently filter out noise is what proves the most valuable value add of social media.

“If you want to follow equity traders, you can put those people into a custom stream. If you want to hear what commodities traders have to say, you can create a stream for that,” noted Sara Jean Goodman, assistant marketing manager at Advantage Futures. “It’s incredibly useful because you can pick and choose who you want to listen to.”