In a 2015 study by Greenwich Associates, it was found that 4 out of 5 institutional investors frequently use social media platforms at work and that nearly one-third confirming that information they consumed on social media influenced their investment decisions.
Since this study was completed, we’ve seen the use of social media increase as well as mature with existing influential users increasing their influence, the rise of “influencer” in all industries, major news sources and their staff publishing on social media daily, and data gathering tools like Bloomberg and Reuters incorporating social media information in their platforms. Anecdotally, if you speak to investors both retail and institutional, you’ll hear mentions of tweets and LinkedIn posts, almost as often or more often than you hear them talk about traditional reports they downloaded from traditional channels.
The lesson is clear, that if you want to build your brand, disseminate information, influence actions, or improve your reputation, we must “fish where the fish are”, and the fish are scrolling through social media at alarming rates.
Let’s start with a discussion of what goals and outcomes we can use social media to solve. Following that we will look at some basic strategies that can be used, how to incorporate social media into traditional IR strategies, and how to follow up on your actions
What problems can you address through social media?
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- Share liquidity
- Brand awareness
- Reputation
- Communicating your value proposition
- Recruitment of employees and strategic partners
Awareness
The first three problems on the list are hard to separate. You want investors to buy your shares and attribute an appropriate value to the underlying assets. For them to do this, they must know you exist, recognize your significance, and trust that you run a clean, investible operation. Think of it like making friends during freshman year of college. You need to meet people somehow before those people will become your friends. If you do not play on a sports team, participate in clubs, show up to college events, or somehow make yourself visible, it can be very hard to develop new relationships. Simply by making your brand present and putting your best foot forward, people will know who you are, which is the first step in building longer term relationships with potential investors. Showing up to the party is the low hanging fruit. Although some are choosing to use Instagram and Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the two platforms most geared toward business and investing.
Reputation
Once people begin to gain familiarity, or increase their awareness of your brand, it’s important that you are perceived how you intend to be perceived – which is hopefully the same as how you really are. Your reputation is made up of a number of factors such as the reputation of the industry or sector you are a part of, the quality of work you do, your perceived level of transparency and ethical behavior, who you associate with, and in some cases, whether people actually understand what you do. Through the content you produce, share and engage with, your social media strategy should include all these aspects of your reputation.
Communicating your value proposition
As hammered home in the 2008 instant classic behavioral economics book, ‘Nudge’ by Sunstein and Thaler, if you want people to take a certain action, you need to make it easy for them. If you want people to discover how efficient your process is, your proven mineral reserve quantities, how well you treat your employees or the environment, or how state-of-the-art your newly built processing facility is, don’t wait for them to come across your press release. Tell them, in a way they understand, in the place where they already spend their time. There are so many ways to do this using social media whether through sharing blog posts or articles, posting links to your press releases, or if you’re able, giving others the tools to do the work for you.
Recruiting
Recruiting key personnel or strategic partners? If the search is not private, make it public. Since you’ve already broadened and engaged your audience through use of social media, why not leverage your audience to make the connections you need to move your operations forward. Posting your existing career listings or plans for strategic searches increases the chance that they will get in front of the right people and increases your chances of succeeding in your search. You can further this effort with additional content related to your career and advancement opportunities, or other information related to business opportunities for which you seek partners.
Review
There are many ways to analyse your past social media performance. One of the great things about using social media is how dynamic the process is. Combine analytics with common sense to determine the best way to adjust your strategy moving forward. Try to determine what type of content is getting the response you want, and how you can improve the delivery of your message in future tweets, posts, etc..
When compared to traditional advertising, social media offers some major advantages in this area. The cost is typically lower and more incremental – you can test strategies out on a small scale and ramp up when you’ve built the confidence, you can alter the format of your future content to further optimize its performance, and you can see measures of engagement.
In future posts we will dive deeper into more detailed ways to use social media to your advantage, show you examples of how companies are making good use of this form of communication, and address some concerns you may have around use of resources and compliance with regulation. Core Consultants incorporates social media strategies in our communications services to get your company’s story in front of the people that matter most to you.
