CME Group Reaches Outstanding Milestone with 750,000 Twitter Followers

Social investors. Earlier this month, the CME Group reached an incredible milestone with 750,000 twitter followers and became the most followed financial services firm on earth.

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

Congratulations to my friend Allan Schoenberg and his CME Group team at @CMEGroup for recently reaching an outstanding milestone on twitter in financial services: three quarter of a million of twitter followers!  And the level of activity on this account is good with 16 daily tweets on average in March 2013.

SEE ALSO

• INFOGRAPHIC Twitter in Financial Services: 10M Twitter Followers, 2K Accounts Globally
• CME Group’s Social Media Financial Services Strategy [Video Interview]
• WEIBO: CME Group’s Social Media Strategy In China [Financial Services]

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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.

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?

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.