October 19, 2017

10 Tips for Social Media Marketing for Banks & Credit Unions:

Social media accounts can provide many opportunities for various financial institutions, including banks and credit unions among them, to gain valuable exposure and gain clients. However, when these institutions don’t use their social media responsibly it can hurt their bottom line and their business. While the top topics are not always savings and finance-related, it doesn’t mean that these sorts of topics don’t have a place on social media. Gaining valuable exposure on social media can help drum up more business and drive traffic to your company’s brand, name, and services. However, social media must be used properly to ensure that the exposure is drawing business to the company and not turning away:

• Create Connections: Social media allows you to create connections to others on the internet who share similar interests or may even be interested in your products. Connecting to potential customers can help drive business and make the most use of your social media “reach” (a number of people who see your posts) and help you get the most business possible from your social media efforts.

• Promote Your Products: Using social media can help promote the products that you are selling. A LinkedIn study showed that 63% are moved to take action after learning of a new product on social media. Showing what your company has to offer on social media is another avenue to drive business into your company.

• Also, Promote Services: You can promote more than just physical products like a bank account or savings plan you offer. You can also promote services you offer such as financial counseling or personal finance services. Services sell just as well as physical objects such as a checkbook or a pocketbook. Many people are in need of financial guidance and showing someone how to handle money and save it can be a great tool to help get the customer interested in other products you have to offer.

• Insight into Your Industry: Sharing meaningful information that consumers and citizens want to know can help build rapport and trust through providing them quality information. Ensure your information is accurate and reliable to ensure you are an authoritative role that consumers trust to guide them in the right direction when it comes to managing their money. If they gain enough valuable information from reading your social media pages, they may be inclined to reach out to use your services and do business with you as well.

• Set Your Social Media Settings: Be sure to set the social media settings on your accounts to ensure that you are reaching your target audience often as possible. Facebook has settings that allow you to do this as does Twitter. The average optimized account (meaning it was set up to reach the target audience) reached 89% of their target audience versus 38% of the target audience is reached when the accounts weren’t optimized or when people were using other platforms.

• Choose Relevant Advertisements: Choosing advertisements for your social media account is probably not something most people look forward to doing. However, instead of dreading advertisements, use advertisements to help further your cause. For example, if you are a financial institution recommend products or apps that help someone balance their budgets or a checkbook that helps customers organize their finances. Advertisements can be annoying but are much less so to users if the advertisement has something to do with the page that they are viewing.

• Connect Channels: Connect your page with others pages that share similar interests and post similar content which in this case is anything financially related. Liking other pages from banks, credit unions, or other financial institutions can help you stay up to date on the latest news and goings-on from the financial world. Sharing each other’s posts is a great way to drive traffic to your site and the sites of the news you post from. It can also help you stay up to date on the most current news in your industry.

• Social Media Can Enhance Communication: Social media can be a great outlet for communicating with customers and potential clients. Responding in a prompt, professional manner to inquiries, questions, and comments can help you answer customer’s questions and help build rapport with the company. Answering personal messages may be the beginning of doing business with a new person or entity that otherwise may not have had a way to reach out to inquire about doing business with you.

• Be Compliance Compliant: Understand the rules of using social media and ensure you are not posting any content or comments that are against the social media platform’s rules. Read through the rules and requirements of using the site before launching your page.

• Verifying Value: View the insights offered by sites like Facebook to ensure that you are posting things that are of value and that are valuable to people who are following your page. These sites offer insight and broken-down statistics to which posts were most popular and were most viewed, liked, interacted with, etc. Using these various numbers to continue to improve your statistics and followings can help you put out better content that more people want to view.

For more information on using social media for your bank, credit union, or other financial institution please feel free to contact us.