Christophe Langlois
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:
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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.
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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.
Great article Christophe, and love the infographic! We at purechannelapps are a social media company too, and our own research suggests there are huge opportunities for financial services companies in social media. What we’ve found typically are two barriers to these types of organisations being fully engaged socially; compliance and reach.
Having personally worked in Fortune 500 financial services companies for the past 7 or 8 years prior to joining here, I am incredibly aware that compliance for financial services organisations is effectively ‘non-negotiable’ (with this particular industry being heavily regulated in many international markets). Another challenge I certainly saw was that whilst follower counts could be in their thousands, often the followers of financial services organisations tended to be employees, or business partners, not the end user, or consumer (of course there are exceptions!).
These issues don’t only apply to financial services either, and when creating our own platform socialondemand in 2011 we addressed many areas of concern for organisations looking to be more socially engaged. Amongst other things, our platform tackled compliance concerns, and the problem of limited reach by creating an authority and audit trail through our platform, and the ability for our platform to enable financial services organisations to post content to selected partners, to post on their behalf. For example, Insurer A could provide content through our system to Broker X, Y and Z. Brokers X, Y and Z can then post this content to their own social media networks, under their own profiles, immediately extending the reach of Insurer A’s original content. All content is authorised at each stage before moving on, closing the compliance loop…