INFOGRAPHIC Twitter in Financial Services: 10M Twitter Followers, 2K Accounts Globally

Twitter financial services. My Visible Banking Team now tracks 2,000+ twitter accounts (banking, insurance, investment…) globally: 10m twitter followers from 88 countries (31st March 2013).

Back in March 2009, my Visible Banking team started tracking twitter accounts and facebook pages from the worldwide financial services industry.  We are proud to be tracking now 2,040 twitter accounts in 88 countries (10 million twitter followers).

All those insights collected for the last 4 years, as well as the depth of our coverage both in terms of industries witin financial services –banking, insurance, investment, cards and payments– and countries, give us an unparalleled knowledge of twitter in financial services.

It enables us to help our clients benchmark themselves against their peers and their competitors, and design some best of breed social media engagement strategies from our best practices curated on twitter and facebook from large and small financial institutions based all over the world.

10 STATS & FACTS (MARCH 2013)

• 10,757,216 twitter followers (aggregated total of followers, incl. potential duplicates)
• 19,129 twitter followers needed to make our top 100 most followed twitter accounts
• 2,040 twitter accounts from financial institutions
• 88 countries represented, including Azerbaijan, Rwanda and Brunei
• 95 twitter accounts dedicated to social customer care
• 28 accounts have added over 100 new followers per day on average
• 13 accounts have over 100,000 twitter followers
• 10 accounts have tweeted over 100 tweets a day on average
• 6x the top 100 accounts have tweeted 6 times more than the daily average
• 5 accounts from American Express are in the top 100

SEE ALSO

• Know Your Followers/Fans (KYF) is to Social Media What KYC is to Compliance
• 90% of Twitter Accounts in Financial Services are Inactive
• Crowdsourcing: In 24h Teenage Cancer Patient on Twitter Gets Insurance To Approve Transplant
• 8 Questions To FNB’s CEO On Social Media Banking, Mobile Payments, Twitter
• Amex Drives Financial Services Innovation With Twitter Payments Via Hashtags

INFOGRAPHIC

Please find below our latest twitter infographic on the global financial services industry with data from 31st March 2013.

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If it is easy to have a twitter presence, and create one or several twitter accounts, it is much more challenging to build trust and establish yourself as an authority and a source worth following on the popular microblogging service.  Twitter is saturated with a mix of inactive or spamming accounts (mostly fake, bots or ghosts) and the volume of noise and meaningless conversations has reached an all-time high.

To have a chance to achieve success on twitter, and in social media in general, you must:

• Know Your Followers (KYF©): so you have a big twitter follower base? Good for you. Bear in mind that it is easy and cheap to buy tens of thousands of ‘real looking’ twitter followers nowadays.  Like with your facebook fans, you must aim to attract the right followers. The valuable ones: influencers, journalists, business partners, employees, prospects, customers.  Size is important, but it is not everything.

• Tweet and engage with your audience on daily basis (SMO): having an account and pushing the occasional press release is not enough. Tweeting once a day a few tweets in a row with a poor syntax (hence virtually no reach) doesn’t work.  You must understand the popular social media channels like twitter or facebook, design and implement a smart twitter strategy based on quality content, engagement, response, and call to action.

I hope you enjoyed reading my article and you found our latest infographic on twitter in financial services insightful.  I encourage you to use this article to make your case internally and convince your Senior Management of the importance of twitter and social media and the tangible opportunity to out shine your competitors.

How do you think you compare with your peers in banking or insurance?  Do you feel your current twitter presence doesn’t generate enough activity?  How much do you know about your ‘communities’ on twitter and facebook?

We are keen to help you better understand and leverage social media within your financial institution.  Please send us an email if you would like to discuss an internal workshop, capabilities and coaching of your teams (social media team or customer service staff), social media strategy or if you are seeking guidance with implementation.

And as usual, I invite you to share your comments, your questions and your best practices on social media in financial services here or on twitter.