Digital tools and tactics
to boost your community bank’s
social media presence
By Sam Schaust
With the average individual spending 100 minutes on social media each day, it’s entirely possible for community banks to share some of that screen time. Among the flurry of soft drink, fast food and big-bank online campaigns, financial social media expert Amy McIlwain sees a tremendous opportunity for community banks to have their voice heard.
“For starters, you need to understand the networks you’re posting on,” she says. “If you’re an online bank or are simply looking for younger, more millennial-type customers, Twitter and Instagram are strong platforms to use. Whereas if you’re looking for more business-type connections like small-business clients, LinkedIn is going to be your focus.”
In McIlwain’s book “The Social Advisor: Social Media Secrets of the Financial Industry,” she assigns each social media platform a moniker. For instance, she calls Facebook “the pub” for its accessibility to connect with clients, stay top of mind for promotional events and share stories to humanize a bank’s brand. Similarly, LinkedIn she touts as “the tradeshow” or “conference.”
“On LinkedIn you need to get out there, engage in conversations, ask and answer questions,” McIlwain says. “Along that same line, I look at your booth as your profile. You don’t want to just have the white tablecloth and nametag. You want to tell me your story, put up a dynamic display, embed video into your profile and differentiate yourself from your competitors. This is your opportunity to make a first impression, so make it a good one.”
Even details like the use of colors can play a significant role. With Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all using a shade of blue, try to dress profile pages and posted graphics with a pop of contrasting color, like red or green.
According to McIlwain, there’s “no right answer” to which social media channels community banks absolutely must use. However, when asked to choose, she highly suggests Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. With a combined 2.5 billion active accounts between the four platforms, banks with a profile on each service bear the best chance to be heard. Fortunately, for banks running all of their social media in house, several tools are available to simplify the juggling act of regularly attending to each platform.
2016 IB Social Media Leaders
View 2016 IB Social Media Leaders here.
Independent Banker® magazine recognizes three community banks who have conducted creative, engaging and impactful social media campaigns. This year’s panel of judges evaluated social media campaigns submitted from several community banks across the country before selecting those that received final recognition. The panel of judges include: Jessica Wallace, former digital strategy/marketing engagement, ICBA; Sarah Elbert, executive editor of Delta Sky magazine; Carly Ferry, senior digital strategist, MSP-C; and Patrick Dix, vice president of public relations at SHAZAM Inc.
Everything in one place
Today, more than 10 million people and businesses use Hootsuite as their chosen social media management tool. Accounts for Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Plus and more can all be tied onto a single page, which allows users to schedule posts to a single channel or multiple channels for any time of day. Hootsuite also offers two paid models that unlock access to analytics reports and a number of services, including the ability to automatically schedule tweets and posts during the times of day when a user’s audience is most active on a designated social media site.
For Jill Williams, a social media coordinator at Louisiana-based advertising firm Spring Media USA, scheduling and monitoring posts on Hootsuite is a daily routine.
“I highly recommend scheduling tools for any banker,” she says. “Even if you’re managing just one Facebook page, the free version of Hootsuite works great.”
As a 20-year veteran of the community bank industry, Williams recalls when she first experienced the strain of maintaining a social media presence alongside other work duties.
“It was a struggle for me—just like it was for every other community banker—to find the time to create posts and find photos because you have other hats that you are wearing,” she says. “Then there’s also fitting posts into a schedule on a routine basis, so that way you don’t have three Facebook posts this week and then you’re silent for the next three weeks.”
Similar scheduling and monitoring tools are available, like Buffer and TweetDeck, but Williams says she’s become accustomed to certain Hootsuite services, like receiving notifications when someone contacts her clients via direct message, a tweet, comment and so forth.
Establishing a pool of topics, Williams notes, was also particularly useful when generating content for her client Patterson State Bank, a $217 million-asset community bank in Patterson, La. “Start off choosing five to seven things,” she says. “For instance, maybe you want to promote checking, loans, community outreach efforts, employees and some inspirational quotes. If you have that in mind, then you can carve out time during the day to create five posts that have to do with each topic and then bucket those posts.”
Last year, in particular, this tactic proved beneficial for Williams as two of Patterson State Bank’s southern Louisiana competitors announced plans to merge. Eventually, Williams and Patterson State Bank’s employees began to hear stories of dissatisfied customers who were looking to take their banking elsewhere because unwanted changes were occurring at the banks.
“Without calling out those banks and the challenges that their customers were facing, we were able to use social media and coordinate posts to regularly promote things like ‘we’ve been here for 90 years,’ ‘we’re not for sale’ and service-related posts like ‘we’ve still got free checking,’” Williams says. “During that time, which lasted for about six months, we actually had lots of interactions on Patterson’s Twitter and Facebook pages, through direct messaging, and we were able to pinpoint that we did indeed bring in new business due to social media posting and increased brand awareness.”
Expand your reach
For community bankers with a narrow social media outreach, a targeted ad campaign through sites like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook may help in reaching a new audience.
“There’s a tremendous opportunity right now for targeted social media advertising,” McIlwain says. “In Facebook, for instance, you can do something called Custom Audiences.
“If you have the emails of your clients, you can upload those onto Facebook and find accounts that match up to them and define the key traits they have in common. It’s a great way to target people by demographics, location, income, net worth, where they went to school, their age, by gender or even whether they like dogs or not.”
Businesses that use targeted advertising through a platform like Facebook can control how much they spend on the outreach effort. For example, a community bank may choose to spend $100 on a targeted campaign through Facebook. What a bank can then decide is which type of audience it wants to receive the ad, as well as how it would like to be charged. If a bank wants to only be charged each time a Facebook user clicks the ad, it can indicate this in its purchase agreement with Facebook.
Additionally, banks can choose to be charged for every impression or the number of times the ad is displayed on a Facebook user’s page.
“If you choose to pay per click, you typically want to aim for less than $1 per click,” McIlwain says, “but you can get it lower than that depending on who you’re reaching out to” and how often an ad is shown before someone engages with it.
A little fun now and then
As for a no-cost alternative to increasing your community bank’s online presence, Williams suggests occasionally taking a break from posts that directly relate to your bank and its products or services.
“Once a week with Patterson State Bank,” she says, “we do a fun post that is off-the-cuff and has nothing to do with the bank.”
A particular highlight moment of this tactic’s success occurred last July, Williams says, when Bill Marin, Patterson State Bank’s chairman of the board and executive vice president, captured video of an alligator walking across a golf course green when he was about to putt. Marin sent the video to Williams who then added some music to the clip and posted it across the bank’s social media channels with the tagline “There’s a new Greenskeeper in town!”
“It went viral,” Williams says. “The video eventually was picked up by a couple of TV stations and they interviewed Bill on the news. It even hit newspapers, other social media accounts and went all the way to Baton Rouge.”
Altogether, Williams found the video managed to reach more than 44,000 people on social media and earned a combined total of roughly 2,000 likes, comments and shares.
“Mind you, this had nothing to do with Patterson, its services, products or people,” she says, “but the bank got so much exposure because the video came from its social media sites.”
Social Media Top 10
A global look at which platforms control most of the market
When it’s OK to unplug
According to McIlwain, “customer service is extremely important for banks on social media. You’re open to receiving comments 24/7 and people are going to want responses.”
A rstudy by Bloomington, Ind.-based marketing agency Convince and Convert found that 32 percent of people expect a response from a bank or business within 30 minutes of a customer service request. Furthermore, 42 percent of people expect a response within an hour of their post.
Williams and McIlwain agree that community banks should aim for an hour to an hour-and-a-half response time. “At Patterson, during the course of normal waking hours, we respond within no less than an hour,” Williams says. “I don’t think it’s any different than if someone calls your bank after hours and they leave a voice mail.”
Hootsuite’s notification tool, which sends an alert to an individual’s smartphone or email, can be particularly useful in these instances. “Nevertheless, I think customers don’t typically expect to be responded to through social media at 10 o’clock at night,” Williams says. Convince and Convert’s study came to a similar conclusion as nearly half of its respondents said they didn’t expect the same response time during late evening hours.
However, if a community bank would prefer to keep its customer service requests offline and either in person or over the phone, be sure to clarify that, McIlwain notes. “Something like: If you need customer service support, please reach out at this number or email,” she says. “Have that displayed in your description or somewhere visible on each social media profile you use.
“Customers appreciate transparency and, especially if you’re a community bank, they will understand that you have a life outside of work, too
Missed Connections+
Not engaging in social media channels a lost golden opportunity
By Patrick Dix
Social media channels may be global communication engines, but they also potentially powerful local points of connectivity. Channels such as Facebook and Twitter have become more than just a way to keep up with real-life friends. They’re now main windows to our world everywhere, including on Main Street.
Unfortunately, too many community banks are missing golden opportunities to connect with their current and possibly future customers because they aren’t participating on social media platforms. A recent study from Pew Research found that 62 percent of Americans get their news on social media. That’s a 13 percentage point jump from 2012.
For a community bank, social media offers lots of ways to interact with many current and prospective customers in meaningful and memorable ways. Sharing information about community events, explaining industry issues, commenting on the day’s financial headlines, or even highlighting bits of good news about employees or customers can help build a loyal following on social media.
Just as important, people will share your posts and greatly multiply your bank’s potential to reach new customers. If your community bank wants to remain a relevant voice in its community, engage your customers where they are—on social media. Every day you choose not to engage with them, they could be interacting with others, including possibly your bank’s competitors.
Patrick Dix is vice president of public relations for SHAZAM Inc., a payments network in Johnson, Iowa. A former news anchor, he teaches community bankers how to maximize opportunities with local media, including social media. For more information, visit www.shazam.net.
Sam Schaust is a writer in Minnesota.