Using Social Media for Investor Relations

In September 2009, IR Alert conducted a survey of investor relations (IR) professionals to establish a benchmark of social media usage. Results of the survey, in which 270 executives participated, indicate that about 60% of industry professionals use social media in some way, especially those who work at smaller firms. However, only 12% of IR and CFO respondents indicated that they use social media to disseminate financial information to shareholders and the market.

Although conference calls (and press releases) remain the single most commonly used methods of communicating investor relations information to shareholders and the market, about 6.3% of respondents now use a corporate blog to communicate financial information, but 13.6% of companies with annual sales under $50,000,000 use one. IROs and CFOs are definitely involved in social media with 60% of respondents using social media tools from Del.ic.ious and Digg to Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube. Twitter ranks as the most-used social network for this purpose, used by about 79% of social-media. LinkedIn is by far the most popular social network among investor relations professionals, with almost 80% of social-media-engaged respondents using it at least once a month.

IR Alert survey respondents indicated that the investor relations industry's best-read blogs are the IR Web Report Investor Relations Blog, written by Dominic Jones, and IR therefore I AM, written by Gene Marbach.