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IR Twitter trailblazer Nestlé – one of the first companies to set up a Twitter account dedicated to investor relations – has wound down its @nestle_IR handle, merging it with the main corporate feed. ‘As of next week, this account will be merged with @Nestle. Follow us there for all Nestlé-related updates!’ the firm tweeted to its 935 followers on July 24.
‘The feed never achieved great momentum, and was always something of an experiment,’ notes a post titled ‘Nestlé: divesting a Twitter feed’ from consultancy Bowen Craggs & Co. ‘Just as corporate apps are now being quietly phased out, so the fashion for some social media channels is passing. The resources needed to keep up a good investor Twitter feed must be found – and justified.’
This is a sentiment echoed by many IROs. And while you might expect smaller firms especially to have the most to gain from time-efficient, money- saving technology and social media, few were making the most of the medium.
Guido Pickert of IR Magazine Award nominee AIXTRON sums up why the German tech firm has a somewhat tech-shy IR department. ‘We are open to everything but those things are a conflict of resources,’ he says. ‘We have to be open, then see what it costs to implement and decide whether it brings us a return.’
For Bowen Craggs, the trick is to know which channels are still worth following. ‘Slideshare has a loyal following among companies that find it useful for spreading presentations, while LinkedIn is also getting some serious corporate use,’ it notes. ‘In our view, the earliest form of social media – the blog – still has the most to offer.’
So while surveys might show that around half of investors use social media for work purposes, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a need for a dedicated IR Twitter feed.
Nestlé’s decision to shut down its dedicated IR Twitter feed may be part of a wider trend, or it may simply be dropping something that never quite took off. Either way, as Bowen Craggs notes, ‘it is significant that [Nestlé] has decided it is no longer worthwhile.’
