The Fidor Bank Story: A Lesson in How and Why Banks Must Utilize Social Media

In April this year, computerweekly.com published an article based on Ovum’s various studies of the global banking sector where the research agency predicted that “social media will become a significant channel for retail banks in Europe within three years”.

Let me give you one of the finest examples of a bank utilizing social media. Germany’s Fidor Bank was established in 2007.  It is the world’s first online-only bank that operates only through the internet and using social media. From customer service, communications and engagement to new product development, everything happens on social media at the Fidor Bank.

Fidor Bank’s success through social media is best described by Karl Finders in his article when he says, “Fidor currently has more than 200,000 people registered and 150,000 community members. It has €160m worth of deposits, and its lending totals about €100m. With only 34 staff, no branches and a cost of only €3.50 to set up a customer with full banking, the overheads are low compared with traditional banks”. He adds, “Fidor’s customers trust it because it listens to them all the time through social media and customers have a trusted community supporting them”. 

How did Fidor Bank achieve this?

At a time when customers’ trust and faith in their banks was at an abysmal low, courtesy global economic crisis, Fidor Bank’s leadership took a bold move. They were brave enough to rely entirely on social media to restore that trust through personalized social media interactions. They communicated openly about issues related to banking and personal finance on social media. They opened channels on Facebook and Twitter for their customers to interact candidly with them, thus creating a high level of operational transparency. In no time Fidor’s customers realized that this bank was genuine and trustworthy. So, customers who came to Fidor Bank, stayed with it. In fact, even the bank’s customer service is handled by loyal customers on their social community.

Key takeaways from Fidor Bank’s strategy:

• Use social media to overcome the cost and complexity of traditional banking
• Always listen to your customers.
• Make social media a customer engagement tool.
• Increase customer trust through an online community
• Increase sales and improve customer service through enhanced customer communication strategies.

So, would you like to emulate Fidor Bank? To know how Shout Analytics can help you, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com.

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.

Competitor Analysis: Social Media Analytics can be a Path Breaking Tool to Venture Upon

You have a social media strategy in place and have an active presence on your social channels. Your social engagement is also much appreciated and liked by your target audience. Good going so far. You have played your cards right in your consumers’ case, but what about your competitor? Have you studied their social media strategy? What is their Facebook campaign like? What content do they post on Twitter? Who are their key influence rs  What topic is doing the rounds in their message boards? How much of their social content is liked and shared? What are their consumers’ conversations centered upon? Are their social engagement methods and means better than yours? What does it mean for your brand?

While these questions may sound simple, they are actually very critical for your organization/ brand’s competition management. And finding accurate answers to these questions is equally important if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. But where and how can you find these answers? According to me, conducting Competitor Analysis using a social media Analytics tools is the best way to find out what your competitors are faring on the social platform.

Shout Analytics is a sophisticated new age social media Analytics application that comes with a high end Competitor Analysis module.

Benefits of Shout Analytics’ Competitor Analysis Module:

a) Monitor your Competitors

Using Shout Analytics’ Competitor Analysis Module, you can monitor and get detailed reports your competitors’ social engagement initiatives and understand their marketing strategies. Use the insights derived to formulate a new or sharpen your existing marketing strategy.

b) Get Insights into the Conversation of your Competitors’ Target Market

The Competitor Analysis module of Shout Analytics allows you to seamlessly keep track of all the conversations surrounding your competitors’ brands. Find out what are the specific key words and trending topics in these conversations. Use this value-rich data to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and build your marketing strategies.

                               

c) Understand the Vibe around Your Competition

Shout Analytics’ Competitor Analysis module ensures that you effortlessly understand the primary sentiments prevailing among the target audience of your competitor’s products/ brands. Use the negative, positive and even the neutral sentiments there to your benefit – understand what your potential target audience wants or predict future trends.

d) Explore Untapped Markets

While analyzing and studying your competitors’ market reach, you also get an insight into the demographics of their target markets. With better understanding of who wants a product/ brand like yours, you will be able to discover newer markets and expand your product reach.

To summarize, Shout Analytics’ Competitor Analysis Module helps you to easily monitor, gather, analyze and report on all your competitors. It provides you with priceless actionable insights to develop strong, powerful capabilities that will outsmart your competition.  

To know more about Shout Analytics, write to info@shoutanalytics.com

Social Media Analytics: An Unique Solution To Filter Noise From Social Data

 Author: Suraj Arukil 

 About the Author: CEO/Founder of Nuvento ( a technology firm that specializes in Business Intelligence and Software Architecture.)

In my earlier posts I tried to explain how social media analytics helps you to carefully listen to the conversations surrounding your brand’s activities and carry out an appropriate analysis. Additionally, I also discussed how can you find and engage with prospective customers. However, tracking social media platforms allows organizations to improve their brand value followed by the resourceful insights with the help of social media monitoring.
 

Consumers take decisions based on the nature of the conversations happening over a specific brand’s products and services. These mass conversations even portray wide variety of responses which could be either positive or negative and even are neutral at various occasions. Fortunately, social media is one such platform in the current market where organizations can hang out to look for their sought out answers on their brand’s performance. 

 

As of today, people are promptly responding to and sharing their views about every new and existing trends, products and services over social media. Thus, social media plays a vital role which is more than just being a mere platform of conversation and networking to a platform where organizations can receive valuable insights about the consumer responses.
 

Importance of Filtering Noise
Let me consider an example of Microsoft Corporation launching the Windows 8 Operating system in order to receive a better understanding on this subject. Before launching the new Windows 8 operating system in the market, Microsoft Corporation released the beta version of it. The main purpose behind this step was to incorporate the received customer feedback for an improved customization of its complete version. 

In such a significant juncture of business oriented steps, even an established organization like Microsoft Corporation would look out for a solution where it can get all the relevant scores of the consumer responses. However technically at this stage social media analytics stands out as the best option for being a solution in such an instance for different organizations.
 

Role of Social Media Analytics
Now the real question is, how one can separate the relevant and useful information out of the voluminous amount of social big data shared over social media? This is the scenario where social media analytics come into the picture for helping organizations and individuals compute the relevancy scores. In an instance like the Launch of the trial version of Windows 8 by Microsoft Corporation, people will be conversing over this version in the form of likes, sharing and commenting. 

At this instance social media analytics separate these relevant conversations on the brand from the extensively voluminous traffic of various conversations over numerous arrays of social media platforms. 
 

Shout Analytics is a unique patent pending solution that assists organizations to understand and engage with audience over social media. It provides resourceful insights like demographic data, social mentions, trends, etc. These insights help organizations to figure out the market responses.
 

To know more about Shout Analytics, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Why Do Organizations Need Social Media Monitoring Tools?

 Author: Suraj Arukil 

 About the Author: CEO/Founder of Nuvento ( a technology firm that specializes in Business Intelligence and Software Architecture.)

 It’s obvious that the social media scene is changing fast and business organizations are increasing their presence on social media and social networking channels like never before. The aim here is undoubtedly, social engagement in order to reach out to existing and potential customers, expand market reach, better target promotional campaigns and boost business in general.

But, as I said in my earlier posts, social engagement is just one part of a successful social media strategy.  But, in order to get a 3600 understanding of how ones social media strategies are working or to know in exact numbers what ones social ROI is. To me, the logical next step after Social engagement should be social media monitoring. Why? Simply because, it’s not just enough to ENGAGE with the target audience, business organizations also need to LISTEN carefully to conversations surrounding their brand/s, products and services, UNDERSTAND the sentiment behind the conversations and continue to do this consistently over a long run. This is where SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING, made easy through social media monitoring tools, comes in handy for organizations.

So what do social media monitoring and social media monitoring tools essentially do for organizations?
•It monitors the social conversations in different social networking channels and finds out the trending topics in those conversations and also tells what is being talked about.

•Social media monitoring tools give you geo-demographic details about the conversations. In other words, it pinpoints where and when the conversations happened.

Image Source:kana.com

•Using these tools, organizations’ can find out who are their key influencers – those people who are talking the most about their products and brands.

•Social media monitoring tools also tells what the nature of conversations and the sentiment behind it is – positive, negative or neutral.

•Plus, high-end social media monitoring tools also gives you detailed comparative input in the form of charts and graphs on your competitors’ performance on social networking channels.

Which business organizations need social media monitoring the most?
I’d say any organization with a definite social media strategy and dealing with hundreds of transactions on a daily basis, irrespective of its size would surely require a social media monitoring system. Whereas marketing departments of every business organization stand to gain from social media monitoring tools, Advertising & Houses, PR Agencies and Financial Institutions stand to benefit in particular.

Shout Analytics
Shout Analytics is an innovative social media monitoring and analysis platform that enables organizations to use the power of social media to understand, monitor and engage with its customers. Our self-service social media reporting platform provides an aggregated view of an organizations social media interaction across social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn and Blogs. With Shout Analytics, you can easily monitor customer sentiment (sentiment analysis), measure and benchmark your performance among competitors (competitor analysis) while identifying brand advocate and influencers.

To know more about Shout Analytics, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com.

Social Media Engagement Can Drive Your Business

 Author: Suraj Arukil 

 About the Author: CEO/Founder of Nuvento ( a technology firm that specializes in Business Intelligence and Software Architecture.)

Social networking sites are a treasure-trove of new business opportunities and business benefits. I believe that every business organization that is looking to drive business should include social media engagement as part of its marketing strategy.

Why So?
Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram etc command a tremendous lot of attention and traffic today. By utilizing the benefits well, organizations can build effective customer relations, discover new ways to serve your customers, make product innovations, expand your market reach and boost sales.

Therefore, my suggestion to all business organizations, both veterans and brand new ones, is that if you want to drive your business, take your brand to where your customers are – to the social networking sites.  What social networking sites do is that they equip organizations with a distinct power to bring their target audiences closer to them in a way that traditional forms of marketing or advertising can't.

And the Best Way to Accomplish This?
To me, the focus here should be exceptional social media engagement. You see, the key to successful social engagement lies in generating highly interesting, informative, attractive and fun content across all the social channels of the organization and ensuring that the content is especially tailored to suit the tastes of the target audience.

So far so good. But what next? In the age of neck-break competition, it is not just enough to have a strong social presence. What modern businesses need today is a means to monitor the social media engagement efforts. They need to know the state of their social ROI and know the impact of their social media engagement efforts. But how can business organizations achieve this? The answer lies in superior social media analysis tools that not only help organizations to monitor their social activities but also has the unique ability to handle big data.

Social Media Analysis Tools
High-end social media analysis tools should be competent enough to scan through the highly unstructured and intensive user-generated content on social networking sites and filter the important information from the general chatter.

Shout Analytics is one such sophisticated social media analytics platform that helps organizations to use the power of social networking sites to understand, monitor, verify and respond to customer preferences and feedback. It also generates insightful “social reports” that assist heads of the organizations to take decisive actions to drive their businesses.

With its top-notch analysis modules like Predictive Analysis, Sentiment Analysis and Competitor Analysis, Shout Analytics empowers organizations to effortlessly monitor customer sentiment, monitor competitor activity, understand brand perception and even identify new market segment.

To know more about Shout Analytics, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com