Banking on Social Listening

10 STEPSTO A SUCCESSFUL

STRATEGY FORFINANCIAL SERVICES

BANKING ON OCIAL LISTENING

Understand The LandscapeFind out where your community “lives”. Do your customers and prospects engage on twitter, blogs, forums or mainstream news? What keywords do they use the most? Maybe they’re discussing “banks”, “credit cards”, “investments”, “equities” or “brokers”.

A listening platform will help you seek out these conversations to give you a firm understand-ing of who your community is, and where they are – this information will be key when you’re ready to engage.

Cover All Channels And LanguagesStart by casting a wide net. You’ll start noticing where most of the conversations are happening. Pay attention to those forums. Social media is bigger than Twitter and Facebook. For your brand, it’s wherever people are creating and sharing content. It could be anywhere — blogs, forums, message boards, LinkedIn, or niche online communities. For some industries, the best place to be, may still be forums and message boards. For others, it could be LinkedIn or niche online communities.

When you start drilling down on zeroing in on the insights that matter most to your brand, picking the right keywords and in native languages will increase the effectiveness of social media monitoring. Like online search, the right keywords used will help direct the company to right conversation channels.

Pick the wrong keywords or going too broad and you’ll miss out on critical chatter or pick up too much noise. This applies to picking keywords in the right language too, as the world is not flat and languages play a big part in various markets.

IntroductionWhen customers have a bad experience with their bank it often generates an emotional reaction — money is a personal subject. Social media has provided consumers with a magnified voice that can have a huge impact on a bank’s reputation – and responding to your customers’ and community’s negative experiences quickly and efficiently can turn a bad situation into a winning customer experi-ence.

Unfortunately, many Financial Services companies are still hesitant and slow to adopt and embrace the lucrative opportunities of social media, on account of the hefty industry regulations.

Rules around what information can be shared, how it can be shared, archiving engagement and more, have kept many Financial Services organizations at bey in the social space. Meanwhile, they are missing out on a powerful opportunity to integrate social into customer service, marketing, crisis/reputation management, sales and HR initiatives.

It’s not hard to see why many Financial Services organizations are lagging behind in the social marketplace – faced with the hurdles of complying with the rigid SEC and FINRA regulations – but, with the right education and technology, Financial Services companies can tap into all the benefits and rewards social media has to offer.

Build A Community Around Your BrandSocial media monitoring platforms provide the opportunity to get to know your community inside and out. When you’ve understood their past preferences, you’ll give them a richer experience in the future. You’ll also discover who is the most influential in conversations surrounding your financial services brand. These loyal supporters will spread your message even further throughout the social web.

Engage With Customers And ProspectsReach out to your customers and prospects at their point of need and use their feedback to enhance your services.

Even despite the heavy regulations around the industry, some Financial Services companies have been effectively leveraging social to attract a new generation of social customers. Charles Schwab, TD Bank, Fidelity Investments, Vanguard, American Century and American Express and New York Life all use social media for customer service, thought leadership and keeping their brands front of mind.

Archive Content And Engagement The Financial Services regulator, FINRA, requires all social media content to be stored for at least three years. Last year, the SEC announced a ‘risk alert’ on the use of social media by financial advisors, which emphasized the importance of compliance policies including record-keeping and third-party content. It’s imperative for Financial Services organizations to leverage a social listening solution to archive all company posts and engagement to ensure you and your team stay inline with industry regulations.

Align Social Monitoring With Business Objectives Defining the right parameters plays an important role in maximizing insight on social media conversations. One of these is to ensure the social media monitoring strategy is aligned with the company's business objectives.

This can be achieved by identifying the business objectives then evaluate how social media can contribute to accomplishing these goals. A business-aligned social media strategy helps to justify the business case for investing in the right social media monitoring and engagement tool that is critical to its success.

Develop A Strong Social Media Policy

It’s important that everyone involved in your company’s social media efforts thoroughly understands the social media compliance regulations. If you’re using a listening platform, make sure your team is fully trained on your tools, and how it can help your company stay compliant in the social space.

Create An Engagement PlaybookYour social media playbook should be a “how-to” book for employees, built on the fundamentals of your social media policy. Provide clear examples of information that can be shared on each unique social media channel, and information that needs to be shared out of the social media sphere.

Your playbook should also outline a detailed process around when to take communication with your customers offline and route them to the right customer support representative. Include a validation process to respond as quickly as possible to your consumers, and prioritize engagement around negative feedback

Be Prepared For Escalating CrisesDefine what a crisis is for your company, and build a crisis response chart with several levels of severity – this chart should outline who will be tasked with what in each situation. For example, if your company Twitter account gets hacked or an employee sends a mistweet from a corporate handle – you need to know who will be in charge, how they will be contacted (if it’s outside working hours), and how they will deal with the situation at hand.

Synthesio worked with a Financial Services client to create a social media communications plan involving a six-tiered alert process. For each tier (level of crisis) an alert system was put in place to ensure the appropriate employee for each tier was alerted at the time of crisis.

Measure And Report Your Success

Once the conversations start rolling in, measure your results. Tracking discussions will enhance your social media strategy, and help you get to the bottom of what’s being said. The enterprise will also need to create metrics and key performance indicators of its social media strategy to track success against business objectives. If not, it will waste time pursuing information that doesn't really matter to your brand.

BANKING ON SOCIAL LISTENING10 STEPS TO A SUCCESSFUL STRATEGY FOR FINANCIAL SERVICES

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In this ebook we will help your financial services brand developAn effective social listening strategy by you showing you how to:

Align social media monitoring with your business objectives

Develop a strong social media policy

Create an engagement playbook

Understand your industry’s social media landscape

Cover all channels and languages

Build a community around your brand

Engage with customers and prospects

Archive content and engagement

Be prepared for escalating crises

Measure and report your success

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ConclusionThe social web is changing how financial services companies do business.It’s shifted how they communicate within their own walls, and how they communicate with customers. It has also given customers a voice and a platform for feedback, opinion, discussion, and collaboration that has never been seen before.

According to a recent study by Forrester, 45% of online U.S. adults who have a Twitter account are interested in interacting with financial services firms via Twitter, and consumers also say they are interested in receiving promotional alerts, financial advice, and customer service from their financial provider viaTwitter.45%

























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In a recent aba banking journal blog post, ceo of beyond the arc, Steven J. Ramirez noted that the best way to decide which negative comments to respond to is to simply follow a process similar to a hospital triage. “First, fix what’s obviously broken. If there is a serious complaint, engage those customers quickly.”

First things first. Before you dive into listening and engaging, cover your bases. Develop and implement a strong, clear social media communications policy to share with your employees and financial advisors, that will leave no question around what company information is acceptable to share and how engagement is recorded and archived.

























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Bank BNP Paribas, well-known for its creative social media marketing initiatives, has successfully tapped into a whole new community, thanks to innovative campaigns like We Are Tennis. Looking into our Synthesio dashboard, we can see the buzz around BNP has gone from conversations around bank services and credit cards to discussions and posts about sports. BNP has found a way to expand their community-base and social listening gives them the tools to seek out these conversations, drill down and engage.

And depending on the global reach of your company, it may be important to consider investing in a tool that provides vast global coverage and language capabilities. For example, if you have customers and prospects in China, you’re missing out on a wide range of opportunities if you’re not paying attention to the Chinese sites, like Renren, Sina Weibo and Tencent.

























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Last year, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney granted its 17,000 financial advisers partial access to Twitter and LinkedIn. In order for the tweets to comply with securities regulations, Financial Advisors are required to draw from a prescribed archive of Twitter messages and submit LinkedIn postings for approval – and in turn, the tweeted and posted content gets archived.

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There is nothing worse than learning of a crisis from internal compa-ny sources when you have a full-capacity social listening system in place, so it is important to make sure you have the right alerts set up. Simple KPIs will alert you at the right time - before the fire sparks, and keeps you from being overwhelmed with data at crucial times. An easy way to do this is to base your alerting on:

Data spikes to watch for an unusual influx in negative online conversations pertaining to your brand

Real-times alerts on your most sensitive topics

Following the Parkinson’s law, leaders know that clear goals and short deadlines are a key variable to success. This rule applies to social media quite well. One short-term goal at a time associated with one KPI is an effective way to keep control of your activities and teams while following a clear roadmap to achieve your long term mission.

For example, if the business goal is to increase customer satisfaction, your brand should be looking to measure positive sentiment around the organization and its brands. To improve product quality, it should be measuring the number of product-related issues posted.
























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Are you listening to what your

community is saying about your financial services organization

and your competitors?

What’s your strategy to becoming

compliantly active in

social media?