Part 2 of our 3-part series
Hurray! Your bank has successfully created a content marketing strategy. You’ve defined your objectives, identified your audience, determined the types of content that will resonate with your audience, outlined an editorial calendar, developed a distribution strategy and established metrics to measure your results. Whew! Now it’s time to implement that strategy to get you to your goal.
The key to your strategy is a thorough understanding of social media platforms – the platforms your audience are most active on, the best times of day to post to those platforms, the tone of your posts on various platforms and, most importantly, which platforms make the most sense for your bank and the content you want to distribute. Let’s take a closer look at the platforms your bank is most likely to use:
LinkedIn is a professional networking site with 467 million users worldwide. This platform is all about business, so it’s critical you keep your posts to this platform a bit more formal, professional and related to your bank. LinkedIn is especially beneficial to those in the financial services industry because you can position yourself and your bank as thought leaders to attract new customers and monitor your current customers’ profiles for important events – job changes, promotions, graduations, retirements and other events can all signal a change in a customer’s financial situation where you may be able to provide assistance.
An active presence on LinkedIn can help your bank build brand awareness and trust with your audience by sharing industry news that is relevant to them.
Here are some guidelines to keep in mind when posting to LinkedIn:
- Keep your profile and background pictures professional in nature, as well as all your updates and comments.
- Remain active on the platform by posting at least three times per week during business hours.
- Write a personal message to others with whom you wish to connect, instead of using the default LinkedIn message, “I’d like to add you to my LinkedIn network.”
- Tag colleagues, influencers and companies you follow in relevant posts to stay top-of-mind with people or brands you’re targeting.
- Remember the 80/20 rule when posting – make sure 80 percent of your content is informative and the remaining 20 percent promotional. Share content, add to conversations, comment and start discussions in groups to mix things up.
By far the most popular social network with one billion worldwide users, Facebook is a powerful marketing tool for more than 16 million businesses, organizations, companies and public figures. The social media platform can be a great way to build brand awareness, provide customer service, perform outreach to your audience and receive feedback.
While Facebook is certainly less formal than LinkedIn, it’s important that your posts project a positive business persona. Facebook is a great platform for posting all types of content from blog posts to infographics to videos. The platform also encourages engagement through options including likes, shares, comments, mentions and hashtags.
Here are some ways to engage with your audience on Facebook:
- Respond to feedback from your audience in a timely fashion – especially the negative comments! A best practice is to reply within an hour if possible, but no later than 24 hours. And those negative comments? Respond publicly so your audience knows you’re listening, but take the conversation offline as soon as possible.
- Post several times per day during business hours, preferably between 1 and 4 p.m.
- Remember the 80/20 rule from LinkedIn? The same applies on Facebook.
- Use a content management system to schedule your posts ahead of time, and comment from the platform as well so that all your content is archived.
- Keep it professional – it’s fine to post content that shows your bank’s personality (maybe it’s a company outing or charity event), but remember that this is still a business page.
Twitter is a social network that operates in 140-character messages called tweets. The network currently has 288 million users who send out 500 million tweets per day. Twitter has a reputation for being an easy way for customers to voice service issues, complaints and compliments directly to a company. You can send short updates to your audience and include links to your website, engage in public conversations with your customers, and ask questions of your audience to better understand their needs.
While Twitter can feel somewhat confining due to the 140-character limit, it’s one of its most endearing qualities. The brevity of posts on Twitter enables you to pique your audience’s interest and drive them to another link (like your website, for example) for more information.
Here are some tips for using Twitter to promote your content:
- Post content on a regular basis, ideally several times per day, and even on weekends! A study by Dan Zarella found that while weekdays were peak times to post on Twitter, weekends saw higher click-through rates.
- Remember to tag influencers in retweets of their content.
- Mind your manners! Thank people for their retweets, comments, favorites and follows.
- Include images and videos – tweets with images get twice the engagement as those without.
- Post appropriate third-party content, and make sure it’s approved and adheres to your bank’s social media policy.
Why is social media such an important component of your content marketing strategy? Download our infographic to see how consumers connect with financial institutions via social.
This may seem like a lot to take in, especially when you consider the frequency of your posts on various social media platforms. That’s where a content management system can help. With the right platform, you can streamline your campaigns, make sure all content is approved prior to posting, schedule posts on various social media networks from one platform, and archive content for compliance.
Read part 1 of our 3-part series, Content Marketing Strategy for Banks in Six Steps.
Read part 3 of our 3-part series, Measuring Success: Going Beyond Likes and Followers.