6 Ways Social Media Platforms Can Enhance The Banking Sector

Social media platforms can help the banking sector reach new customers.

Communication and interaction are as old as humanity itself. But given the busy schedules and demanding lifestyles, the subsequent time crunch hardly leaves us with the luxury to meet or catch up with our friends and family in person or over a phone call. However, the paradox is that staying connected has never been as important as it is today!

This is because today we believe that the world is a global village, we realize that together we can achieve so much more, and that we need a channel to share and talk and get over the feeling of working in silos like a machine. Our business, news, data, demographics, politics, policies, and in short the world, is experiencing change every single minute.

Social media therefore, was a response not just to the need to chat with friends, but to stay connected, learn, teach, grow, and create awareness. With approximately two billion people using social media around the world, no one can afford missing out on this powerful platform of possibilities. And the banks are wise enough to know that.

With the advent of the Internet and mobile applications, banks are working earnestly to integrate the new channels and deliver a consistent multi-channel experience. However, this has led to a shift in the transactional and informational touchpoints between customer and the banks. For instance, when a customer avails of a bank service like transfer of funds over the internet, he or she does not interact with the bank staff. The bank thereby loses the opportunity of a conversational interaction with the customer, and hence doesn’t get to learn something about the customer, build relationships with them, or create new business.

This is, however, an ostensible picture of lost opportunity. A closer look at what electronic transactions when coupled with the power of social media can yield, presents a plethora of opportunities instead. Social media, when used strategically, is the most powerful research and marketing tool that the world has ever seen. Let’s take a look at how the banking sector is leveraging social media for its growth:

1. Generating Informed Marketing Campaigns

Using social media, banks can gather information about the tastes, preferences, and needs of their customers. They can then use this information in running targeted marketing campaigns and saving on the overall marketing costs.

2. Drawing Customer Insights

Banks can leverage social media to draw insights about the requirements of a customer, based upon the information they share on social media. Banks can then integrate this external information with their internal core banking data to derive a holistic view of their customers.

3. Providing Lead Generation and Sales

The posts shared by a customer, the likes, and retweets they perform, can all act as important leads for the banks. They can analyse this data and plan the next best actions to convert these leads into sales.

4. Increasing Trust with Brand Development

Word on social media spreads like wildfire. People generally have a tendency to trust their peers more than a typical sales pitch when buying a product or a service. Retweets on twitter, endorsements on LinkedIn, shares on Facebook hold much more value in a customer’s decision making journey than an online ad. Banks can therefore leverage social media as earned media that leads to sales conversion in the future.

5. Enhancing Reputation Management

Banks can hire or train social media savvy staff to create awareness around philanthropic, community betterment, and other noble acts being undertaken by them. In addition to this, banks can also address and resolve the grievances of customers in a more dynamic and timely fashion on social media.

6. Gathering Feedback with Better Performance Management

Banks including FinTech can leverage social media to gather customer feedback, in an open, honest, and direct fashion. This would help banks create a transparent and accountable image in the public eye. They can also crowd-source ideas from customers on social media platforms and offer bespoke products and services. 

There is so much more that the banking sector can do by leveraging social media. Embracing social media in their overall digital strategy is more of a necessity than an option. With more and more people joining the online social milieu, the banking sector needs to tap the realm of social media in order to augment its customer engagement and up its business.