Social Media Marketing for Financial Services

I’m a newer member of the Priority team, but recently I jumped right in by attending the BAI Retail Delivery Conference in late October. Speakers from Facebook, Google, and Zappos.com all had one message in common: social media is what’s next. There was a lot of great information shared, but here are my top takeaways on social media and banking.

Engaging with Communities Using Social Media

• Brad Smallwood, the director of pricing & measurement from Facebook emphasized using fan pages as a tool for banks to engage the community by creating fan pages for individual branches.
• Chase was used as a great example of utilizing Facebook for corporate use, focusing on their 2 million likes on their Facebook posting on recent philanthropic endeavors.

Social media creates a forum for companies to collect new product ideas/suggestions. Engaging with both current customers and potential customers online is a free way to gain valuable input. Building trust with the customer is important, particularly within the financial industry. In addition to listening, it’s important to actively communicate and make sure that your audience is aware of your values.

Why should you use social media?

• Customers are more locally focused than ever, social media makes it easier to engage with local communities.
• Social media moves you from less “corporate” to more personal.
• “If you don’t take the opportunity, the bank across the street will.” Social media isn’t going away any time soon, so you would benefit from looking into following the crowd.

Opportunities/Insights

• Education is key: where are your customers? What are they doing? How are they spending? What are they saying? Knowing these answers helps you reach them.
• Facebook seemed to be a large focus.

Key tip: customers are going from a credit to a debit society, they’re more cautious and don’t spend money that they don’t have.

Social Media Regulations

As my colleague Jon mentioned in his post, social media regulations were a large topic of discussion. The banking industry already values safety and regulations. It comes as no surprise that social media may be raise a few red flags for some banks.

“If we ignore it, it will go away”

• NOT true. You need to engage because your COMPETITORS are using it.
• If there is negative feedback out there on social platforms, ignoring it will not solve the problem.

Need a little more direction? Check out Brian Bierbaum's post on social media engagement models. There is no “right answer” on how to utilize social media. Use it within the confines of how your organization is comfortable.

This blog post was originally published on the Priority Blog at priorityresults.com/blog. Priority Integrated Marketing is now BlueSpire Strategic Marketing.