Happy New Year! Let’s start off the year with something a little less serious than overly burdensome margin requirements and order interaction rules. I’ve written before about how Twitter can in fact be a very useful business tool. Not for telling people what you had for lunch, but for finding and consuming interesting bits of news and information that you might not have found if you only read the morning paper.

So that said, a few SEFs have taken it upon themselves to get on Twitter (DISCLAIMER: Success in the SEF Twitter Awards does not guarantee success in building swaps liquidity, just success in gaining more twitter followers!). These results are based on a survey of one – me. Here are the winners:

The newcomer: @TeraExchange – for SEF nerds TeraExchange has made a good splash in the past couple of months. Seemingly coming out of nowhere, but in reality coming to market with a sophisticated platform years in the making. Their tweet-level is low but increasing.

Establised in bonds, but not yet on Twitter: @MarketAxess – A pioneer in e-trading of corporate bonds, but not yet fully on board with the Twitter thing. Hopefully with a little encouragement we’ll see some more of MarketAxess’s interesting market data hit twitter in the coming months (nudge nudge).

Not really a SEF, but sort of a SEF: @ErisFutures – Eris and its swap futures contract provide an alternative to traditional swaps trading. Their Twitter account is pretty new, but since they’re backed by high-tech Chicago types I have high hopes for their Twitter feed.

Not a SEF at all, but cool for having almost as many followers as Kim Kardashian: @CMEGroup – A futures exchange, a swaps clearinghouse and over 1 million Twitter followers. Keep up the good Twitter work CME!

Honorable mentions: @NYSELiffeUS and @CBOE – just because they’re in the ballpark and very well may offer swaps trading someday.

And the winner of the Twitter SEF award is: @Tradeweb – They win for meeting all of the criteria; they’re actually a SEF (or will be once we actually know what a SEF is), they tweet frequently with useful information and have a respectable number of followers.

So there you have it. Oh, how could I forget. You can also follow @kmcpartland for SEF news. Voting for myself just seemed wrong though, so I didn’t make the cut. Same goes for @TabbFORUM and @tabbgroup. (the shameless plug is now over).

To wrap that up, the accounts to follow are: @TeraExchange, @MarketAxess, @ErisFutures, @CMEGroup, @NYSELiffeUS, @CBOE, @Tradeweb, @TabbFORUM and @tabbgroup.

Happy Tweeting.