Adding a new dimension to its financial knowledge hub

Nov 13, 2009 13:56 GMT  ·  By

Mint is becoming more and more popular, especially in the US. The personal finance service is going from strength to strength even after being acquired by Intuit. Besides the proper site, Mint also hosts an interesting blog, which is more than just a tool to get its message to users, it's an actual resource for all sorts of financial information and knowledge. Now, Mint added a new tool that taps into Twitter to surface the most interesting and relevant tweets relating to finance, but also to create a discussion around similar topics on the microblogging service.

"Twitter has grown into an essential element of our marketing and customer service efforts, but creating your own personalized list of feeds to follow can be time consuming," Aaron Patzer, VP and general manager of Intuit’s Personal Finance group, founder and former CEO of Mint.com, said in a statement. "We have taken the work out of this search for our users - and by adding a ’popular’ tab, Mint.com tracks the hottest finance-related terms in real time, delivering a zeitgeist for finance terms in Twitter."

The new section is dubbed Money Tweets, not very original perhaps, but to the point. It's split up into several sub-sections like “topics,” where most of the action is, “tweets about mint,” “tweets from mint,” a “questions” tab and finally a “popular” section. The tweets about and from Mint are pretty self-explanatory, but the interesting thing is that Mint will track any tweet relating to the service, even those criticizing it.

The biggest draw will likely be the topics section which tracks tweets related to several subjects like “savings” and “investing.” Mint doesn't pull just any tweet which has to do with the subjects, instead it aggregates tweets from about 20 trusted sources like The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. Another interesting section is the “question of the day,” where Mint posts a question and lists the tweets that answer it. It doesn't look too popular at the moment, but the service has just been launched. Finally, the site has a “popular” section where it tracks trending topics related to finances.