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Twitter and the social media craze: Where do banks and ATMs fit?
Scott Mills, a public relations specialist for the financial-services industry, says Twitter offers credit unions and banks a real-time way to improve member and customer relations.
October 17, 2009 by Tracy Kitten — Editor, AMC
Twitter. It's quickly become the rage among college basketball coaches, the media, Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers, and a whole host of industries as a way to quickly disseminate and collect information — for free. Twitter has also opened doors for software developers, who have jumped on the application bandwagon to piggyback on Twitter's success. TwitPay, TweetDeck, Hootsuite, Twellow: Each is a unique Twitter application that can complement a Twitter user's ability to post tweets and follow the tweets of others.
But what opportunity, if any, does this medium offer for financial institutions and ATM deployers? It's a discussion some FIs are having, even if they have not yet taken the Twitter plunge, says Scott Mills, president of Atlanta-based William Mills Agency, an advertising and public relations firm that specializes in working with financial-services companies.
In spring 2009, Mills conducted a survey of more than 60 U.S. banks and credit unions over a 30-day period to gauge their use and interest in Twitter. Of those surveyed, national banks averaged 53 tweets per month, credit unions averaged 22.5 tweets per month, and community banks averaged 8.4 tweets.
The majority (44 percent) of those tweets, Mills says, were replies the FIs posted to posts made by their customers or members, while about 25 percent of the tweets included links to articles or blogs that the FI referenced. About 13 percent were categorized as "chatter," such as a simple post about what the bank or credit union was doing that day or week.
What's interesting, Mills says, is that despite the newness of the Twitter phenomenon, bank customers and credit union members who followed their FIs' posts were quickly engaged, and Twitter offered the banks or credit unions a fast and simple way to respond to concerns.
In recent months, a number of financial experts have touted the critical communications role Twitter plays. In September, during the Credit Union Products & Services Forum in San Diego, Barbara Cure, an e-commerce consultant for NCR, said every FI should be using Twitter as a way to reach younger consumers. And Karen Morgan, the executive vice president of oFlows, a technology company that specializes in Web-based services for credit unions, told the same group that Twitter, FaceBook and mobile-marketing channels are vastly underused in the financial space.
ATM manufacturers have jumped into the game, too. Diebold and NCR both use Twitter.
NCR spokesman Jeff Dudash says NCR is using its Twitter account to share information about events, products and news releases; monitor conversations in the industries NCR serves; share videos and other articles; find resources and tools for projects; and to connect and engage in conversations with the media and NCR customers. NCR has about 918 Twitter followers and posts tweets about four times per week, Dudash says. But how can FIs and other ATM operators and manufacturers use this venue in a constructive way?
"When you're a large financial institution with many thousands of customers, you can use Twitter in a customer service capacity," Mills said.
For smaller FIs, like credit unions and community banks, touching members and customers in a more personal way is easy. For larger FIs, Twitter offers a way to communicate more directly with customers who once were relatively faceless.
"If someone has a bad experience with an FI, someone within the bank can reach out to that person and communicate with him over Twitter," Mills said. "It's an easy and fast way to respond to negative feedback."
Many FIs have been reluctant, however, to embrace that customer-service quality of Twitter. Managing tweets is the primary concern, Mills says. But if upper management can be convinced of the critical role Twitter can play, then identifying a teller or other branch staffer who can manage and respond to tweets is easy.
Here are Mills' recommendations:
- If you are an IT employee within the branch, help senior managers/directors understand that you will manage content. Content should be managed by one person. Or consider tapping a younger associate within the branch for help. Younger associates may be adept in the use of social media applications.
- Make your business Twitter profile mirror your company's branding.
- Maintain control of your tweets.
"People use Twitter for people, so you need to make it personal," Mills said. "But banks are interested in how many resources or what kind of resources they need to do this – and we've figured out that you can manage it all in about 20 or 30 minutes a day, which includes posting the tweets and monitoring the responses."
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