Social media is changing the way that much of the world (including public issuers) communicates. More and more investors are turning to the web for their information than ever before and, while many public companies have yet to embrace social media for communicating with investors, the move has begun. At Equicom, we believe that social media can be used to augment a public company’s investor relations program, leveraging key messages and investor materials.
Public issuers spend considerable time and money developing investor materials, especially annual reports and presentations. But C-level executives only have so much time to meet with analysts and investors while balancing their calendar with the time needed to run their businesses. Social media represents an opportunity to improve communications with existing shareholders and share investor materials with a potentially much larger audience while helping to optimize C-level executives’ valuable time. One of the social media tools that we feel is well suited for sharing your story with a wider audience is SlideShare – the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. The site is also great for sharing other visual documents, including annual reports and investor fact sheets. In fact, we recently uploaded several of our client’s annual reports to our SlideShare account and broadcasted them over our Twitter account.
We will continue to review and implement the use of other social media tools that can augment public issuers’ investor relations programs. We look forward to sharing our thoughts and findings with you as we move forward.
Tags: investor relations, SlideShare, social media
I think that SlideShare is a great tool for things like annual reports. There are are so many different ways of viewing information these days, and everyone has their preference. The more ways that you make information available in convenient formats, the more likely it is that people will read it.
However, I don’t think that the strategy of simply posting something online and hoping that people visit it will work out in the long run.
As I often say, you have to put the “social” into social media. If there are key audiences that you think might be interested in that particular annual report, reach out to them and let them know it is that there. This could include sharing a link to the report on SlideShare via other electronic versions of the report (email, PDF versions).
Thank you for your comment Parker. We agree that simply posting content online with the assumption that people will come find it, would not be very effective. You do have to communicate what you are doing, and social media tools certainly make this easier.
When we uploaded our clients’ annual reports to SlideShare, we ran an annual report showcase on our Equicom Twitter account, letting our followers know what we were doing (I also retweeted our annual report showcase using my own personal Twitter account and shared with my LinkedIn connections). We also sent out a communication to our clients. As a result of our efforts, 11 of the 12 most viewed documents that week in the Investor Relations category of SlideShare were our clients’ annual reports. We’re still getting our feet wet with social media, but we do consider this initiative to be an early success.
Trevor, thank you for visiting my blog: outsidethemargin.biz and your encouraging comment. Your strategy — as an agency — using SlideShare is great! I’ve been trying to get the IR/PR agencies I works with in NYC, Chicago & LA to expand their distribution using platforms like SlideShare. I’d love to speak with you more since I believe we have so much in common. You can also follow me on twitter.com/JoannSondy
Good use of Slideshare and Twitter. Since many IRO’s have been relatively slow to adopt the use of social media, early adopters can set the bar and take advantage of first-mover advantage.
My only other comment/suggestion is that you may get more comments if your blog wasn’t moderated.