The value of a stakeholder-facing blog is easy to see, with companies of all sizes publishing personally authored content to provide context and detail around company news. They can also help manage a company’s wider reputation, canvas stakeholder opinion and support a firm’s investment proposition.
Not every company publishes a blog, however, and rarer still are those that write for their investment communities specifically. But an IR blog offers great potential for companies to add credibility, transparency and personal interest to their shareholder communications.
Cherryl Valenzuela, senior manager of investor relations at Twitter, sought similar results from her firm’s newly introduced IR blog. As a company, Twitter does not issue press releases; instead, it uses its own microblogging platform and a network of 30 distinct blogs to deliver news, data and comment to its various groups of constituents.
‘We had two main reasons for setting up the IR blog,’ says Valenzuela. ‘One was practical: a lot of Wall Street firms block the Twitter.com domain where all our other blog posts are hosted, so our investors couldn’t see them. We put the Twitter IR blog on another domain, which was much more straightforward for our investors to access. We could then curate and cross-post the blog posts they’d care about and put them in one place.’
The other reason, Valenzuela explains, was more strategic. She and her team wanted to be more ‘proactive and creative’ about how they engaged investors and educated them about Twitter. ‘We challenge ourselves to find ways to really leverage the tremendous technology and resources we have at Twitter to tell our company’s story in a more compelling way,’ she adds. ‘Having a blog allows us to experiment with different types of content to share with investors. We can share tweets, images, videos, links to press and other social media. It’s differentiated real estate from our website.’
It also opens up the way to share content that complements the information available on the rest of Twitter’s IR website. Valenzuela says this includes product announcements, customer success stories and management Q&As, while recently published blogs tackle ‘Moments’, a new way for Twitter to highlight the best tweets users may have missed.
‘Original content is best, particularly if created by IR and tailored for an investor audience,’ Valenzuela reveals, though this may not take as long as some time-pressed IROs might think. ‘Twitter IR is lucky to have more than 30 other blogs to draw content from,’ she concedes. ‘We’re in the process of developing our first original content, so that’s more work, but we’re learning a lot from that process. We’ll apply our lessons to develop a blueprint for future content creation.’
It’s a no-brainer for most investors, who have given Valenzuela and her team some strong feedback already. ‘They appreciate the extra color and education about the business that we provide through the blog,’ she explains. Another, more practical benefit is that the blog collates a range of relevant information in one location, so important updates are harder to miss.
There’s still plenty of room for the Twitter IR blog to grow, Valenzuela says, and there are plans afoot for new types of content and wider campaigns to be introduced soon. ‘Stay tuned!’ she teases.
This article appeared in the Winter 2015 issue of IR Magazine
