Banking on Facebook: Building a Brand Through Social Networking
Excepting those living in caves and, perhaps, the cryogenically frozen, everyone knows the following Web 2.0 facts:
● Social networking is changing the face of the Internet.
● No site has done more to bring about this change than Facebook.
Smart banks are embracing Facebook as another channel not just for branding, but also in order to transform mere customers into rabid brand advocates.
A recent article in ABA Bank Marketing (“Showing Your Face on Facebook,” September 2009) magazine spelled out how any financial institution can put a best face forward on Facebook.
For banks, a “business page” is the most common way to make a social media debut. Every day more than 8 million Facebook users become business page fans. (A small beverage concern here in our hometown – Coca-Cola – has more than 3.3 million “fans.”)
As with all branding strategies, it’s important to have a strategy:
● Establish content/messaging issues before you start.
● Determine who page administrators will be, and from there commit to freshening your page often, if not daily. (Only Wonder Bread gets stale more quickly than Facebook fan page content.)
Here’s the best part. All of these “become-a-fan” decisions are transmitted across any user’s network. If a new fan is a recent college graduate with more than 1,000 friends – which can be common – your bank achieves some major digital word of mouth.
And CFOs have little to quibble about. After all, this is a low (no?)-cost way to reach a targeted (if not younger) demographic.
What are you waiting for? Create your business page! (And while you’re at it, become a Mindpower fan! We’ve always got something fun to say to our friends …)
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February 23, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Jack, great blog. We recently used Facebook successfully to promote a survey we were conducting. It sure beat running paid banners and such. We’ve also found that when our blog gets picked up by Twitter(er) we get lots of visitors to our website. The trick is to always have your URL embedded in your posting, where ever it may be. Another good traffic driver that no one like to hear is to update your blog every day. So far it’s working well for us.