Many Investor Relations professionals, Directors and CEO’s know that investors are attracted to companies who “get social”. An amazing social media presence is evidence of a company with nothing to hide while also playing a pivotal role in how your company communicates with shareholders and the general investing public, and potentially attract investment opportunities. After all, harnessing social media investor relations as part of your overall communications strategy can raise your company’s profile, keep investors engaged with your brand, and build equity in your mission statement and long-term objectives. But before you create and publish your content and make your pitch, you need to figure out who your ideal investor is and then go out there and market to them. This article should hopefully give you an effective course of action to attracting the right audience and give your company’s social profile a boost.
Use Social Media Listening Tools
In today’s world, you can’t assume that your ideal investor will come to you; regardless of the amount or quality of your content. What is commonly referred to as “inbound marketing” is a highly scientific,data-driven process which is designed to identify the right audience, and present appropriate content before them, at the right time. Therefore, in order to make the most out of your social media investor relations content and overall communications, you need to do some research first. Find out what your target audience is talking about in social media by detecting patterns in online conversations, as well as things that are being said about both your sector as well as your business itself. As a public or investor relations professional, you have no shortage of Enterprise-level tools to choose from, like Mention and Brand24, but if you are limited in resources or are relatively a novice, there are also a couple of easy to use and free tools you can use to gain insights on investors and improve your marketing strategy.
Consider TweetDeck for example. It is a free yet powerful social intelligence app that can help you identify and follow keywords or phrases about your business sector and company and then begin engaging with prospects online in order to grow your follower network. If you are managing a Facebook page, take a look at your page insights to determine what your top kind of content is. This is ranked by the number of likes, shares and comments your top content has received. Once you have an understanding of what kind of content works best, consider creating and sharing more of that. Finally, I simply cannot go on without mentioning Boardreader. While it is a simple forum search website, but its analytics suite gives you quite detailed results on a specific brand or topic keywords and phrases. Armed with the right intelligence, you can boost your digital footprint to be developing lead-generation profiles and suitable content.
Be Creative With Your Investor Content
If you are a publicly traded company, you are fully aware how quarterly reports, press releases and statements from your CEO attract new investors. Unfortunately, much of this content is business content in the context of social media and the internet comes across as boring. You want to build a connection with investors, and the best way to do so is with conversation as opposed to corporate jargon and pitches. Your content must stand out and the best way to accomplish this is by creating content engaging content for social media. A few examples include:
- Infographics – You can use infographics to visually display progress in your mining operations, your company’s rise to success and industry trends.
- White Papers – These documents differ from other other marketing content as they typically provide your audience with valuable technical content. A white paper can also help establish your company as a thought leader in your field.
- Blogs – Blog posts are a great way to attract visitors to your corporate website and inspire them to taking an action such as subscribing to your newsletter, or downloading additional branded content.
- Webinars and Videos – If you really want to add a splash of personality, then invite your investors to join you in a quarterly webinar where they are given an opportunity to meet your staff online (Quick Plug – If you are interested in learning more about webinars and videos, send RBL Communications a message).
- High Impact Visuals – Somewhat different from infographics, visuals can be used to turn data or statements into high impact visuals. For example, if a previous blog post, the concept of “Micrographics” was discussed; you can read more if you are a busy IR professional looking for some great content hacks
Take Advantage Of Targeted Social Media Advertising
The days when everything you shared on social media reached your followers feed are long gone. As a matter of fact, organic reach has been in decline for many years. Some research has found that even Facebook brand pages with more than 250,000 followers updates reach just 2% of their audience. While social networks like Facebook and Twitter have always used algorithms to determine what content appears in each users feed, many pages have experienced a decline in reach at some point in the last year due to increasing advertiser demand. One solution to this problem is to use social ads. As discussed in point number one, social advertising platforms on Facebook and Twitter allow you to build an investor persona, to whom you can “boost” your page or feed updates, based on their demographics and interests. You can also use import your contacts from an email list and build “custom audiences”; doing this will help you reach ideal investors through targeted advertising. Like any other kind of promotion, you need to set a budget and monitor spending and activity to make sure that you are getting the right kind of traffic and are meeting your goals.
Final Thoughts
Investors on social media will only engage with the best content that appears on their feeds, therefore whatever content you are creating and sharing must hit the high notes. If it doesn’t, then you will end up wasting both your time and money. Quality makes all the difference these days. Take time to create content for each social channel – don’t post a Twitter update on Facebook for example. Always keep the audience you are trying to reach in mind because ultimately, the purpose of creating content for social media is about them above anything else. Only share content that will solicit a response from Investors.
Do you have any Social Media Investor Relations tips you would like to share with us? Send us your thoughts on Twitter @RBLComm
