It’s perhaps more crucial than ever for community banks, credit unions, and financial brands to have a firm handle on what people are saying on social media. It’s easier than ever thanks to social media management tools and keywords monitoring functionality from tech brands serving these types of regulated industries. Social Assurance–the sector’s leading provider of social media management software and compliant content marketing services–has rolled out a new update to its Social Feeds functionality. The feature enhancement allows community banks, credit unions, and financial brands to remain closely in tune with specific words and users interacting with its pages across social media channels–ensuring swift action and timely responses. The evolution comes on the heels of two major app updates this summer, including one that saves users time in creating posts across platforms and an update that simplifies monitoring of content and engagement across major social media channels by pulling it into a central interface. The Social Feeds feature pulls content from across all sub-brands into a single feed, letting you monitor and engage with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (X) content shared across your organization from one easy, accessible location. Its goal? Keep financial brands in-the-know, compliant, and steps ahead of social media engagement and commentary that can gain traction quickly–for better or for worse.
The Logistics of Social Media Monitoring
For community banks, credit unions, and financial brands, risk mitigation and compliance must be baked into every aspect of marketing–including social media. That includes clear workflows and oversight on what is posted, but also how people are responding to it. And the stakes are high. Social media commentary and consumer sentiment can move quickly, especially on the heels of events like the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
What’s more, banks and credit unions with unique divisions, charters, branches, and even digital bank offerings may have unique brands with their own pages. Add to the mix a team of sales agents and/or lenders (or multiple teams) and the job of tracking engagement, comments, and posts for risk and compliance becomes a big job.
Social Assurance’s Social Feeds feature addresses this directly, making it easy for financial brands to view content from multiple sub-brands and social media platforms in one place. From there, they can also like, comment, and share content seamlessly on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (X). The latest rollout, takes social media monitoring a step further by allowing for filtering and alerts based on specific keywords.
The New Keywords Update
The additional keywords functionality allows financial brands to monitor for a standard list of inappropriate words, as well as specific words and phrases they add and group together. The system’s default safety words provide a baseline for brands, ensuring that the standard profanity and concerning words are flagged. From there, users can edit and remove words from the default list, and create their own keyword groups.
Use keywords to quickly and easily identify words and phrases going our across connected sales agents’ accounts, different branches, or in commented responses.
So, for example, a community bank might create a group for inappropriate slang words, a group noting specific user names of people whose engagements and comments they might want to keep an eye on, and another group of words specifically related to current events or economic concerns. Once enabled and new groups are added, the platform filters posts approved from that date forward as well as comments that hit your social pages and sub-brands’ social pages from that activation forward. When a keyword is used in a post that goes out on your social channels–say, something published by a branch location’s marketing coordinator or a member of its lending team–it is then flagged as a note in the status bar on the Social tab, which identifies the keyword group the word belongs to and then highlights it within the social post itself. The platform can also trigger an email or an in-app notification that fires off to the appropriate person for review and oversight.
What the Update Means for Financial Brands
The new keywords functionality provides a number of benefits for community banks, credit unions, and financial brands–especially with regard to consumer sentiment and reputation management.
- Real-Time Reputation Management
Commentary can escalate quickly on social media. The ability to monitor for it and respond in real-time is incredibly important.
- Mitigated Risk on Social Media
Knowing what’s being said, who is saying it, and how people are responding in real-time helps compliance teams effectively mitigate risk.
- Ability to Respond Proactively Online
Keeping communications proactive (instead of reactive) is a best practice, and it’s easier to accommodate when you know what folks are saying about your brand.
- Time-Saving Automation
Whether you’re tracking keywords in posts made by sales agents to ensure they’re on-brand or receiving alerts that include profanity, automation saves your valuable time and resources.
- Consistent & Reliable Monitoring
Relying on an individual or team to effectively monitor your channels can expose your brand to human error, oversight, or inconsistency.
- Seamless Escalations & Collaboration
Alerts and workflows streamlines escalations and follow-up communications, so everyone is looped in on responses and next steps.
- Better Oversight from Compliance
Compliance teams must maintain a handle on what’s happening across social pages, including historical recordkeeping for audits and other oversight. Keywords makes it easy.
- Easy to Get Started
Setting up keywords and these other monitoring tools is as easy as a few simple phone calls, including a few simple trainings for your team.
What’s Next
For Social Assurance’s in-house development team, updates, feature enhancements, and rollouts are ongoing and respond to the unique needs of the banking and financial services industry. Future enhancements include the ability to filter views and queries by a specific keyword as well as the ability to run keywords-related reports for usage and information about who created and approved the relevant posts over a specific period of time. Stay tuned, and if you’re interested in learning more about putting these powerful monitoring tools to work for your brand, follow the link below to get in touch.
