Americans are spending more time on social media than ever–making it a powerful touchpoint for reaching, engaging, entertaining, and educating existing and potential customers. It’s also a place to show off your values. Social media content can be incredibly strategic, reflecting your organization’s culture, the depth of knowledge and experience, the nature of client relationships, and the way your team goes above and beyond to serve them. But which channels make sense when it comes to where your financial brand has a social media presence? Should you be on Facebook? Instagram? Twitter (X)? All of them? None of them? And what about new and emerging social media platforms? Here we break down social media by channel, outlining the pros and cons of maintaining a regular presence on each.
Key Advantages of Social Media
Social media offers a number of unique advantages. First, it keeps your brand in front of existing and potential customers on platforms they frequent. It’s also a great place to share engaging, community-focused content that can otherwise be difficult to get the word out about. For lenders, social media helps humanize and connect commercial and mortgage lenders to people who are–more often than not–not exactly ready to buy, effectively keeping them top of mind when those folks are in the market.
More specifically, social media content gives financial brands a way to capture their audience’s attention and tell them more about a specific topic, product, or initiative. Let’s face it: People aren’t visiting bank branches with the regularity they once did. Instead, they’re passing lots of time daily on social media. And, in order to reach them, your brand needs to be there, piquing their interest with compelling content.
Similarly, while we hope our target audience will see the content and information we put on our website by visiting it directly, the fact of the matter is that most people aren’t regularly visiting their bank’s website without being prompted. But, on the flip side, how often does a headline capture your interest while scrolling through social media, so much so that you click and read it? The same is true for your audience on social media. In short, social media is a useful place to stay in front of your audience and capture their attention with news, stories, education, highlights, and other compelling content.
Social Media Risks & Challenges for Financial Brands
While benefits abound, there are concerns. As a financial brand, your social media content must be reviewed by compliance. That can mean slow turnarounds that make it difficult to capture in-the-moment content–things other industries simply don’t have to worry about. There is also a need to ensure compliance with paid social–that means compliantly targeting audiences with content in a way that doesn’t violate important regulations like Fair Housing Act and UDAAP (among others). Then, of course, there’s reputation management to consider. You’ll need to develop protocols and workflows for monitoring and responding to inbound commentary, especially complaints. Lastly, financial brands have archival requirements, making it important to retain record of social media communications for audits. All of this rolls up under compliance, making it absolutely critical to have a content and compliance solution built for the unique regulatory needs of the financial services industry for managing social media and marketing content.
Which Channels Make Sense
When it comes to channels, there are certainly pros and cons to each. Below, we’ve outlined considerations for each key social media platform, as well as new and emerging networks.
- Facebook
Facebook remains a dominant force in social media, offering a versatile platform for content sharing, community building, and customer service. It supports various content types such as written posts, videos, events, and ads, making it essential for maintaining brand presence, engaging customers, and fostering community outreach. In short, a Facebook presence is incredibly important, and can be a lucrative way to reach new customers and engage existing ones organically, through strategic campaigns, and with a paid strategy. If your financial brand is not yet on Facebook, it’s time to take a serious look at launching a business page.
- Instagram
Instagram, renowned for visual storytelling, is ideal for financial brands looking to showcase products, services, and behind-the-scenes content through photos and videos. Brands can also reach Instagram users through video via reels and stories. With a predominantly younger audience demographic, Instagram is an important part of your communications strategy insofar as it can help you reach and capture younger accounts.
- X (Twitter)
X (Twitter) focuses on real-time updates, news dissemination, and customer interactions through short messages, known as tweets. It attracts professionals, influencers, and news seekers, making it a useful platform for financial brands. However, the change in ownership and operational principles over the last year have created some instability for the platform. For financial brands, a risk-reward analysis is in order when considering a presence on X (Twitter).
- LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform tailored for business-related content, networking, and industry insights. Through articles, company updates, and job postings, financial brands can leverage LinkedIn to enhance thought leadership, build the personal brands of executives, lenders, and others within the organization, and certainly for recruiting and retention efforts. LinkedIn is a great place for content about give-back initiatives and other ways you’re supporting the community. When it comes to social selling and lender outreach, LinkedIn is also incredibly valuable. Financial brands evaluating LinkedIn opportunities should consider both how they will deploy content across their brand’s page or pages, and also how they will coordinate and help manage content posted by lenders. Technology can help here (Social Assurance’s Sales Agents solution, which is designed to cover social selling for lenders from three angles: Content, training, and compliance workflows and approvals).
- Other Platforms
Of course, there are emerging and less-commonly utilized platforms for financial brands to consider. Their popularity can ebb and flow, making them important to keep an eye on, but not necessarily important to act on near-term. Threads, integrated with Instagram, sprung up in 2023 as a competitor to X (Twitter), offering short-form updates called threads tied to but also independent of users’ Instagram accounts. Channels like Pinterest and YouTube have established audiences, but aren’t necessarily ideal for financial brands due to the types of content sharing they’re built for. What’s more, these platforms are less centered on building a brand presence, and more about facilitating the delivery of videos or products. Snapchat and TikTok can help financial brands reach a younger demographic and, for some community banks and credit unions, they make sense. However, it’s important to be practical about what your marketing team takes on–especially when it comes to channels like these that will need to be actively managed and supplied with content on an ongoing basis.
In short, what’s right for your financial brand depends on your short- and long-term goals. However, for community-focused financial institutions, the opportunity to reach new and existing customers in a time when so much of their attention is focused on one or more social channels simply cannot be overlooked. When it comes to getting eyes on your brand, people, products, and services, these mainstream social media channels are undoubtedly crucial. That means financial brands should, at very least, be taking a hard look at the most ubiquitous platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn. It’s no longer a matter of whether your financial brand should be utilizing these channels, but how.
Next Steps
Launching onto a new social media platform, maintaining a consistent on-brand presence, and actively managing policies and compliance around them can feel like a lot. Social Assurance is here to help. We’re experts when it comes to helping community banks, credit unions, and financial brands streamline content and compliance efforts and social media is a crucial piece of that puzzle. Need to outsource content creation in a way that’s true to your brand and deeply local (and, of course, compliant)? Unsure how to activate lending teams and leverage social selling to generate leads and loans? Check and check. Overall unsure about what next steps to take or how social fits into your broader content strategy? We can help with that, too. Get in touch below to learn more.
