Despite the financial crisis being over, banks are still pretty unpopular, and nowhere is this more apparent than on social media.
Compared to other industries, the financial sector is struggling to win fans on social media. A report in The Guardian cited research from a study by Carlisle and Gallagher Consulting Group which surveyed over 1000 consumers on how they interacted with banks on social media. The results weren’t pretty.
From The Guardian:
Half the consumers feel that banks use of social media is ineffective, according to a recent survey by the Carlisle & Gallagher Consulting Group. Even worse: 87% of the 1,002 consumers surveyed think banks use of social media is annoying, boring and unhelpful. Perhaps out of some aversion to being bored, only about 7% of those 1,002 consumers actually follow banks on social media.
Out of those 70 people who did click that follow button, the majority follow their bank on Facebook (83%), while just fractions follow them on Twitter (26%) and LinkedIn (16%).
That means most of the people who describe the banks’ social media efforts as unhelpful, boring and annoying have seen little to none of whatever it is that these banks are actually posting on Facebook or Twitter.
It just goes to show how difficult it is to build a brand on social media, as opposed to just maintaining or modifying it. It also doesn’t help that banks are heavily regulated in what they can and can’t say, which restricts their ability to be spontaneous or add a human touch to their social media interactions. And finally, despite the time that’s passed, people still haven’t forgotten the tremendous damage the financial industry was responsible for during the financial crisis. No amount of clever tweets or animated GIFs are going to fix that perception anytime soon.
