From planning content to writing captions and from editing photos to managing reviews and approvals, scheduling, publishing and interacting with followers–social media has a number of moving pieces. Depending on how many pages your brand has across channels, the workload can be substantial. What’s more, financial brands have some additional considerations–most of which revolve around compliance and risk exposure. Whether your community bank, credit unions, or financial brand has been on social media for years or considering getting started altogether or on an additional platform, here are some critical missteps to avoid in the process.
1. Poorly Defined Workflows
Who plans content? How do they get details, photos, and other information for posts? Who creates and schedules them? Who’s running point on graphics, design, and branding to keep things consistent? When and how is compliance looped in? If any or all of these steps are fuzzy, issues abound. Content isn’t consistent and your pages look abandoned or uncredible. Content isn’t timely and opportunities are missed. Policies aren’t followed or properly documented.
Some simple planning tools that incorporate task management functions and the ability to source content from others, create it, and assign it to compliance and leadership teams for review are crucial. When you go about evaluating options, be sure to look for a solution designed specifically to streamline content and compliance with the unique needs of financial brands in mind.
2. Cumbersome Compliance Documentation
With the right tools in place, managing content from planning to publishing with key compliance checkpoints should be easy and painless–it should also be properly documented. The ability to seamlessly produce an auditable trail of reviews and approvals that can be accessed by compliance teams and auditors saves tons of time, and ensures compliance every step of the way.
Of course, streamlined compliance documentation extends beyond social media content. Whether it’s a paid digital ad campaign, long-form content for your website, or other paid ad–a seamless process with proper documentation for finalizing and approving the final content and creative should be a non-negotiable for both time savings and risk management.
3. Undocumented or Unfollowed Policies
When it comes to tracking and managing both content that is drafted and published through your financial brand’s social channels and inbound messages and comments, it’s incredibly important to have clearly outlined policies–and to ensure they are followed. These policies also mitigate risk and issues by ensuring there are clearly outlined expectations for employee usage of social media (both professionally and personally), as well as account access–which can become an issue if someone leaves your organization.
4. Account Access & Admins
Speaking of account access, this is an area that can cause some difficult-to-remedy issues. For risk mitigation and compliance, it’s important to maintain a firm handle on who has native access to your social media account, but also who has limited and publishing access through approved social media management vendors like Social Assurance.
As a general practice, it’s a good idea for at least two people to have admin access to each social page on each platform, but no more than three. One of those admins will likely be in a senior marketing and/or communications role, and it’s usually a good idea for that person to maintain oversight on who else has access to draft, scheduling, and approve content. If you’re unsure who has access to what, a quick audit is likely the best place to start.
5. Issues with Lender Content
One area that can be a serious source of frustration for community banks, credit unions, and financial brands on social media is content from teams across the organization–especially lenders. On one end of the spectrum, lending teams (or business development or sales agents–however your organization classifies these client-facing teams) can be a frustration for marketing teams in that they don’t engage in social selling or post about the clients and activities they’re involved with. This is great, authentic content that could help the brand and really engage potential and existing customers, but lenders are timid or unsure how to get started. On the other hand, some financial brands have the opposite challenge: Lenders who are highly active on social media without a ton of oversight checks that can make marketing teams a little anxious about things like compliance and brand standards.
To manage these challenges, financial brands need tools that make it easy to provide lenders with grab-and-go content they can customers quickly and easily in an on-brand fashion. They also need systems and processes that make it easy for marketing and compliance teams to review and approve lender content in a way that leaves a seamless audit trail. (Social Assurance can help with both, by the way.)
6. Avoiding Social Media Altogether
It can be challenging to keep up with everything going on in social media, where it seems algorithms are changing, new platforms are emerging, and updates are inevitable. For many financial brands, opting out can seem like the best option. Frankly, sometimes it is. Not every new thing in social media is a trend worth jumping on–and it’s important for financial brands to weigh the risks and rewards.
At the same time, social media is here to stay, and these platforms have become places where existing and potential customers spend a great majority of their time. The ability to get in front of them with interesting, engaging content and messaging is more important than ever. What’s more, a robust social presence on the right platforms can signal credibility and market presence. It can also be incredibly valuable in reaching new clients, tapping into new commercial markets, and key outcomes like increasing deposits and loan originations. In short, your financial brand may not need to be on every single social channel, but some are non-negotiable at this point and there are resources that can help ensure your social presence is advancing your brand forward, actually reaching your audience, and generating ROI.
7. Monitoring Mentions & Commentary the Hard Way or Not at All
It’s not enough to simply plan, create, and publish content to social media channels. Social media is an active forum, requiring monitoring, management, and ongoing oversight. If you’re on a couple channels (or perhaps more) and maybe even have a couple divisions or lines of business with a branded social presence, this can quickly become a lot of work. And, the reality is that it’s incredibly difficult to manage messages, comments, mentions, and commentary by hand.
Social Assurance can help. Our Marketing Platforms is designed to streamline content and compliance, and built to plug directly into all major social media channels. This means you can actively manage outbound content sourced from across your organization and drafted, edited, and approved by marketing and compliance. It also means marketing and compliance can manage inbound content and communications from various channels and avenues in one, easy place. That includes monitoring for keywords, the ability to moderate comments on posts written by or about your organization, and more. The platform makes it quick, easy, and auditable–saving tons of time and resources and keeping all your content compliant.
Interested in learning more about how community banks, credit unions, and financial brands use Social Assurance to streamline content and compliance?
