The 10 top-searched stocks in 2014: Twitter is No. 9

Yahoo Finance is digging into your top-searched stocks in 2014 according to Yahoo.com and the number nine stock you searched for was Twitter (TWTR).

The social media company had a less than stellar year when it comes to stock prices (down 40+%) and the biggest takeaways from our Yahoo Finance panel of experts were: It’s still not mainstream enough, and it’s still not Facebook (FB).

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“The big question going into the year was, ‘What is Twitter?’” said Yahoo Finance’s Jeff Macke. “The big question leaving the year is, ‘What is Twitter?’ So far the answer is just kind of this niche-y thing that you can’t explain in an elevator ride and your grandma will never use.”

Editor-in-Chief Aaron Task explained further: “The question is whether Twitter can become a mass market product or if it’s gonna remain basically an area where journalists talk to each other and celebrities talk to their fans.”

It’s worth noting that all of our Yahoo Finance experts are active on Twitter, as is Yahoo Finance itself.

As Task points out, Twitter’s user base is currently around 300 million – roughly the population of the United States. Facebook, on the other hand, has well over a billion users on both its site and mobile.

“[Twitter’s] growth isn’t great in terms of users,” said Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli. “They don’t really know if it’s just kind of a media consumption tool or a peer to peer platform that doesn’t have great growth potential."

“Twitter is no longer a story stock,” added Columnist Rick Newman. “It’s a niche company. It’s a neat little niche company but it’s not Facebook.”

“People have to figure out how to evaluate this company and they don’t know yet,” said Santoli. Still, the majority of analysts rank the stock a buy or a hold with just one underperform and one sell in recent coverage. Macke disagreed with the consensus, though, saying Twitter is, “a good investment for the guys who invented it, everyone else has been left out to dry. I couldn’t be less interested.”

With all of those criticisms in mind Macke perfectly summed up the feeling many people to share about Twitter: “I still kinda like it.”

Watch Yahoo Finance this week for the rest of the most-searched stocks of 2014.

More of the top-searched stocks of 2014:

No. 10: Amazon

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