2 quick ways to improve your credit union’s social presence

Business leaders have been trying to determine the ROI of social media since it blew up in 2007. That’s understandable. Time is short and it’s important to make sure you’re focused on the right activities as a marketer.

So let’s start with some data and research.

A while back, Gallup mentioned that only 10% of customers used Facebook or Twitter to interact with their financial institution in the last six months.

That led Onovative to conduct our own research around the topic and we found that only 7% of respondents under the age of 35 were interested in following their credit union through social media.

And to pile on the bad news just a bit more, earlier this year CUGrow analyzed the penetration of financial institutions within social channels to further show that account holders just aren’t fanning and following their financial institutions on social channels.

Not looking good for the argument to build a big social presence, right?

That’s ok.

The key takeaway from all of this research is giving people a reason to want to engage with their financial institution on social channels. Looking through that lens, here are two things you can do to beef up your social presence.

BUILD TARGETED ADS

This is a great option to supplement any outbound campaign. Now that almost every social channel allows you to build a custom audience based on email addresses, you should consider building custom audiences with targeted offers.

That’s great, but what is a custom audience?

The high level overview is that sites like Facebook and Twitter will allow you to upload a list of email addresses into their ad platforms. If your member used that email address to sign up to the social network, the social network can match it to your member’s social profile and ensure that your member sees your ad.

This gives you a great deal of precision in targeting ads toward individual segments of people.

Imagine being able to pull a report from your core banking system based on specific criteria, like an auto loan, and having those members see targeted ads on Facebook. .For extra credit, now imagine sending this same list of people print and email offers for the same campaign, while they’re seeing your ad on Facebook.

This is something you can do today.

In fact, I’m personally so excited about this opportunity that I put together a Credit Union Marketer’s Guide to Cross-Selling on Facebook that will walk you through setting up your first custom audience on Facebook..

GET OUT OF THE BUILDING

If engagement on your social channels is what you’re after, then you’re going to need to promote what other people are doing. It may be counter-intuitive, but the fastest way to get people talking about you is to talk about them.

And a great place to start is your own business customers.

Run a report to take an inventory of all of your business clients and be sure to grab their physical address in the report.

From here you can create a custom Google My Map and import the physical addresses of all of your business accounts. Google’s My Maps is a powerful mapping engine, yet easy to use. Once all of your business accounts are in a map, you can get creative and change the color of the map markers based on industry (e.g. retail, food & beverage, etc.)

Add a list of what each color means in the key and you’ll have a quick way to identify each of your business customers.

Next, pick an industry, like retail or food and beverage and come up with some basic, “getting to know you” interview questions. Once you have some questions, set up some time with these member business owners for a promotional interview.

Don’t just tell your business accounts that you value their business, show them. Reach out and let them know that you want to highlight them on your social channels. Think they’ll say no thanks?

Even if they decline, you’ve just differentiated your financial institution as an organization that truly cares and spread a great deal of goodwill, just by asking the question.

When it’s time to conduct the interview, Google’s My Maps even makes route building easy. You can build a route on your map between places of business and access it from the mobile app for turn-by-turn directions. Easy as pie, right?

Since you’re likely already walking around with a “studio in your pocket,” during the interview remember to use your phone to capture audio, video and pictures. This is the content that you can push out directly onto your social channels and make blog posts.

When the post goes out, be sure to share it with that business’ social accounts. They’ll almost always share the post with their fans, which gets you in front of their customers.

Win-win.