Christophe Langlois
Social media banking. In August 2014, Siam Commercial Bank reached a major social media milestone with 200k twitter followers on the @SCB_Thailand twitter account.
As part of our Visible Banking Twitter Watch series, my Team now tracks well over 3,000+ twitter accounts (banking, insurance, investment, cards and payments) globally: over 220 million twitter followers from 88 countries (1st May 2014).
Congratulations to Siam Commercial Bank (@SCB_Thailand) for recently reaching no less than 200,000 twitter followers! It positions their twitter account in the global top 25 financial services accounts.
@SCB_Thailand’s growth in 2014
In the last six months, @SCB_Thailand added close to 80,000 new twitter followers.
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:
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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.
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 on Siam Commercial Bank’s major 200,000 twitter followers milestone, and also your best practices on twitter and social media in financial services.
If you enjoyed reading my article or if you wanted to react, I invite you to connect with me here, on twitter (@Visible_Banking) and on google+.
