Turkey Garanti Bank Reaches 100k Twitter Followers

Social media banking. In March 2014, Garanti Bankasi reached the major social media milestone of 100k twitter followers with the @garanti twitter account.

My Visible Banking Team now tracks well over 3,000+ twitter accounts (banking, insurance, investment, cards and payments) globally: over 20 million twitter followers from 88 countries (1st March 2014).

Congratulations to Garanti Bank (@garanti) for recently reaching no less than 100,000 twitter followers!  It positions their twitter account in the global top 25 most followed banking accounts.

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 on Garanti Bank’s major 100,000 twitter followers milestone, and also your best practices on twitter and social media in financial services here, on twitter or on google+.