Nationwide Insurance Reaches 100k Twitter Followers with Nascar Nationwide

Social media insurance. In September 2013, Nationwide Insurance reached a major milestone with 100k twitter followers for their Nascar Nationwide twitter account.

My Visible Banking Team now tracks 3,000+ twitter accounts (banking, insurance, investment, cards and payments) globally: over 18 million twitter followers from 88 countries (1st September 2013)

Congratulations to Nationwide insurance (@NASCAR_NNS) for recently reaching no less than 100,000 twitter followers!  It positions their account at #22 in the world (financial services), #2 in the world (insurance) and #8 in North America.  In August, the twitter team at Nascar Nationwide tweeted a bit more than 20 times a day on average.

SEE ALSO

• Global Top 20 Twitter Accounts in Financial Services [17.6M Twitter Followers]
• INFOGRAPHIC Twitter in Financial Services: 10M Twitter Followers, 2K Accounts Globally
• Know Your Followers/Fans (KYF) is to Social Media What KYC is to Compliance

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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 and your questions on Nationwide Insurance’s major 100,000 twitter followers milestone, and also your best practices on twitter and social media in financial services here or on twitter.