Social Media for Financial Services Organisations

Invest in a Strong Social Media Strategy

Strict regulatory bodies and privacy and security concerns make social media a tricky landscape for financial services companies. However, financial organisations that do embrace social media can benefit immensely. According to consulting company Gallup, customers that interact with their bank using social media are 12% more likely to be mass affluent and 18% more likely to be emerging affluent. Engaging these social media users and gaining their trust can give financial organisations loyal and lasting customers and brand advocates.

How can financial companies get there? By building customer trust through human-centered social media content, providing customer service within regulatory guidelines, and using customer feedback to improve their products and services.

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Some Finance Companies We've Gotten Results for:

Connecting with Customers Through Social Media

30%

of customers that interact with their bank using social media are mass or emerging affluent

Rebuilding Trust Through Human Connections

Customers no longer need to visit a brick-and-mortar bank for the majority of their financial transactions. According to Gallup, 57% of Millennial and Gen Y customers have gone mobile for their banking. The shift towards electronic banking has reduced the need for human interaction, posing the risk for customers to feel distant from their banks.

Social media presents an opportunity for financial services companies to bridge that gap and reintroduce a human-level connection with their customers. Especially since the economic crisis of 2008, customers are craving the ability to trust their financial institutions.

Depending on their strategy, financial companies can work to humanise their presence through social media by posting personable content. This can be anything from photos from a sponsored charity event, or highlighting an individual employee with a bio of their background and role at the company. This type of content showcases who that company is as a brand, what they stand for, and what their values and ethics are.

By adding a human element to their social media presence, financial organisations can rebuild a genuine connection with their customers.

Mitigating Customer Service Risks

Social media has become a default customer service channel for banking and credit card customers. For instance, if a customer doesn’t see their direct deposit in their bank account, they may turn to social media to see if there’s a bank-wide problem before calling their bank. Financial services companies need to be attuned to their social media channels to spot issues before they snowball.

Mitigating customer service issues over social media is complicated for any industry, but financial regulatory bodies (FINRA in the US and FCA in the UK) add an additional layer of complexity for financial organisations.

All customer-facing teams within financial services companies need to be trained to engage with customers within the regulatory framework of their region. This can mean avoiding language that can be perceived as influencing a customer to choose a particular product, and knowing when to take customer conversations private.

Taking the necessary security precautions and ensuring that your social services team is trained on regulations will help you avoid heavy fines and protect customers’ privacy.

57%

of Millennial and Gen Y customers have gone mobile for their banking

68%

of US adults that own an investment account have a profile on at least 1 social media network

Leverage Data From Social Listening

Besides just engaging with customers and providing service through social media, financial companies can also use data gathered from social media to improve products and services. For instance, a group of customers may provide the same feedback on how an app feature can be improved. The company can then relay that feedback to their development team to improve the feature.

When customers see that their banks and credit card companies actively listen to and address their concerns, they will trust that brand and be more likely to stick with them.

Using social listening to engage with your audience in real-time helps them embrace your brand in their environment.

“They are my trusted advisors when it comes to monitoring and measuring the conversations and sentiment of my brand across the social sphere. Our Account Manager knows our brand inside out and always offers us a considered viewpoint backed up with hard facts and data.”

Digital Marketing Manager, Global financial organisation

How We Approach Social Media for Financial Services

Financial services companies have complex setups, given the highly regulated industry that they navigate in. They need an agency that can truly integrate with their current systems, in order to set up and execute effective and compliant social media strategies.

We have a proven track record of integrating seamlessly with financial organisations’ inner structures, establishing effective processes for engaging on all of the brand’s platforms. We also provide in-depth reporting, breaking down our insights into actionable steps to improve products and services. And since we’re a global agency, our teams are capable of collaborating across languages and borders to provide compliant and effective social media management.

We manage social media for some of the world’s biggest financial services companies. Here, we’ve compiled our learnings and insights from our experiences managing social media in the financial sector.

Global Moderation and Risk Management

We provide social media customer service, audience engagement, content management and moderation across a range of channels for a multinational banking and financial services holding company. Since the brand has audiences across multiple regions, it’s crucial for them to maintain a consistent presence while remaining compliant to all relevant guidelines in each territory.

The Social Element manages their presence spanning Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube in multiple regions. The ability to scale up to meet demand is important to the ongoing success of this project. One event earlier this year resulted in 5,300 enquiries in a single day – a spike we were able to easily meet by working closely with various client departments. Through these efforts, we were able to achieve a 2min 56sec average Facebook enquiry response time.

Our approach and responsiveness has helped them improve their customer service and manage risk in a highly regulated industry.

Social Media Engagement for Financial Organisations

In an age when mobile banking is swiftly overtaking transactions at brick-and-mortar banks, social media presents a unique opportunity for financial organisations to engage with their customers. However, strict regulatory bodies make social media a delicate landscape for the financial sector.

More than in any other industry, financial organisations need to set clear guidelines for engagement in public and open channels. This guide explores what financial institutions can do to set rules of engagement for their staff, how to effectively moderate a community, and ideas for engaging social media content.

Seamless Integration for Effective Moderation

Our client, a multinational financial services corporation, needed us to act as an extension of their customer service team. We integrated their internal processes, cross-training with their customer-facing teams, and established guidelines for customer engagement on their various platforms.

We handle all of their social media monitoring, checking comments and Tweets via our social media management tools. Then, on a daily basis, we send a report analysis of social media conversations, along with regular recommendations based on this data. Thanks to these recommendations, executives can identify how customers feel about each aspect of their products and services. We help them use social media to gain insight into what can be improved and modified.

Are you ready to amplify your social strategy? Drop us a line. We’ll get in touch with you ASAP.

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