Social media is a very powerful tool for many different reasons. Those who do not understand it can fall in the trap of deeming it as a non-legitimate form of communication and marketing and miss out on a wide array of benefits. According to Oberlo, there are about 3.2 billion social media users, 68% of which are Facebook users (Oberlo).
If your bank or credit union is not taking advantage of social media or doesn’t deem it important, I’d like to provide some food for thought. Let’s examine 5 perks of using social media that can help your financial institution with communication, advertising and enhance your digital lending experience.
1. That’s Where the People are
Like I mentioned in the introduction, there’s a lot of people on social media. As younger generations grow up and become more prominent targets for lending, traditional advertising and communication is not as effective. According to Oberlo, 90.4% of millennials and 77% of the Gen X age group are social media users (Oberlo). And I don’t need a data point to say that they’re always scrolling. The reality is that social media is where the general population is and if your organization wants to reach and communicate with them, it must adapt to the preferred platforms.
2. Communication
This leads me to my second point, communication. Social media is great tool to communicate with your members and customers. Encourage them to get connected with your financial institution on social media so they can learn about new features and benefits. Additionally, this is great way to publish holiday hours and other important changes such as phone numbers, new branch locations and features on your website.
3. Advertising
Social media is great way to advertise to a tailored demographic of people. Facebook/Instagram gives you the opportunity to create audience groups so you can tailor the specific message to loan types and services depending on specific characteristics of that audience, like age, relationship status and geographic location.
4. Data
Unlike traditional marketing, social media gives you real time data on the performance of your social media posts and social media advertisements. Data is very valuable as you can measure if your efforts are producing the results that you set out to accomplish. You can also see what content your audience engages with the most. Perhaps you launched a credit card advertising campaign in October to prepare for the holidays and data shows that it was successful, you may want to recreate it the following year.
5. Real Time
Social media is all real time, meaning you can make a change and it will be live instantly. Unfortunately, mistakes are made and when they are done in a print advertisement in local newspaper, it’s a done deal. But a social media post or advertisement can be removed instantly, updated and re-uploaded within a few minutes.
Digital Lending Toolkit
Social media is an asset that should be in your bank or credit union’s digital lending toolkit, to help create a well-rounded digital experience for your members and customers. If you’d like to learn more about enhancing the digital consumer experience, check out our recorded webinar for some more best practices.
