Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Why and How Should Banks Leverage Social Media?



Recently I read a report in socialsamosa.com by Rehab Chougle explaining how Indian banks are using social media sites. Chougle opined that though banks in India have a social media presence, they have not leveraged social media right. His thought provoking article made me dig further. I found that Indian banks were missing some crucial elements in their social strategy. They were -

  •       Active Engagement
  •        Proactive content
  •       Positive reputation building
  •       Social interaction monitoring and measuring
  •       Ability to predict audience sentiments and to satisfy customer expectations
So, what should banks and financial institutions be doing?

  1. Pay Attention: Banks and other financial institutions must closely monitor their social conversations across all social channels and find out how much of that is indicating a positive, negative or neutral talk about their brand.
  2. Glean Customer Insights: As the use of social media intensifies, the customers and target audience constantly exchange information online. Identifying relevant information surrounding your brand and analyzing it to know your customers’ wants and needs will help you serve them better.
  3.  Monitor Brand Reputation: your customers’ perceptions underline your brand’s reputation. And they are talking about your brand on their blogs, on discussion forums, on review sites, over chats etc. So, it’s essential that you monitor the entire social scene to analyze your brand reputation.
  4.  Sight Trends in Audience Behavior: Do you spot a distinctive pattern in your customers’ views and opinions? Perhaps they all (in their own specific ways) are suggesting the same thing with regard to a particular product and service? You need to identify, understand and analyze such trends and extract insightful customer information from them.
  5. Counter Competition: Your brand’s competitors also are using social media. Hence, if banks want to counter competition, they must possess the critical knowledge about their competitor’s social marketing and engagement strategies.
  6. Filter the noise: The social sphere is huge and the data deluge is enormous. So, banks must find a cost effective way to filter the noise from music and manage their data streams across all social channels.

Social Media Analytics Tools for Banks

Banks can do much more with social media if they harness the power of Big Data competent Social Media Analytics Tools (SMA).

Advanced Social Media Analytics tools like Shout Analytics with their Competitor Analysis, Predictive Analysis and Intent Analysis capabilities help you pick social trends and patterns, thus helping you to sieve through your pile of social data and separate noise from useful, actionable  information. It further analyzes the collected data and provides crucial information pertaining to brand reputation, sentiments surrounding the brand, customer intent (behavior), competitor performance and also customer demographics.

So, if you are a financial institution looking to leveraging your social strategies, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com and or register for a free trial and find out how we can help you.

1 comment:

  1. Potential employers can easily find out more about you if you’re a member of LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. Your information is available at their fingertips through a simple online search, so it’s essential to maintain a professional online brand. You must take into account who is viewing your social media profiles by monitoring what pictures and comments you are positing to each site.

    ReplyDelete