Social media marketing tips for financial services

The financial sector faces its own particular challenges when it comes to digital marketing and social media in particular

It’s not exactly considered the sexiest of industries but social media is a necessity – it’s where your customers are so that’s where you need to be as well. The question is, how do you compete as a finance firm against influencers, funny viral videos, memes? How do you engage your audience and keep them interested?

In this blog post, I’m going to share social media marketing tips for financial services.

Before you get started with social media marketing though, make sure that your firm is in compliance with any online promotion laws; whether there are special regulations for running a contest on social media or for data collection, it’s always best to check and protect yourself.

And now, let’s get into those tips:

Leverage social listening and monitoring

Social listening is an incredibly powerful tool that can bring a lot of value to your business. there are multiple ways that you can use it to your advantage, such as:

• Learning more about your audience: social media provides a wealth of interesting data about your customers – not in an invasive way but rather more about their needs and interests as a whole, and other relevant information like where they spend most of their time online, what channels they prefer, and what kinds of content they like. This then helps you choose the right social network and shows you how you can better engage your audience through content
• For customer service: it’s no secret – or much of a surprise – that finance brands tend to get quite a bit of hateful commentary on social media, and a lot of customer service issues. Even when you post something completely unrelated to your firm or finance in general, you could still easily get a customer service issue like below with Barclays UK on their Facebook Page:

While you’re going to catch these comments with your social media management tool, it’s quite likely that people are talking about your brand and complaining about it even if they’re not tagging you in their posts or tagging you incorrectly.

But just because you don’t see these mentions, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist – and, in fact, could potentially be damaging your reputation. Social listening allows you to catch any mention of your brand as soon as it happens so that you can respond as soon as possible.

It’s not all business, all the time

Every company has its own set of brand guidelines – some more serious, others cheekier – but it’s important to remember that a very big part of social media is…well, being social. And that involves being occasionally funny, or getting a little personal, or sharing some behind-the-scenes shots – however, it’s completely up to you and your guidelines what’s appropriate and what isn’t.

For example, on the American Express Instagram account you’ll often see photos of delicious meals:

Or, they take pictures of American Express cards and beautiful places all over the world:

Use these types of content on your social media to help humanize your brand and to entertain your followers; for example:

• Behind the scenes images and videos from your offices, events, company meals, and so on
• Images of foods, drinks, etc. from a company meeting, event, or lunch
• Photos of beautiful landscapes or sceneries
• Memes that are relevant to the finance industry
• Photos and videos of participating in fun Internet challenges

Get personal: leverage your customers for awesome social content

Earlier, we covered types of content that aren’t exactly business related, but oh-so-popular on social media.

But what about when you need to get a little more serious? It can’t be all fun all the time, but it can also be difficult to come up with engaging social media content that is relevant to the financial services.

Plus, you want to be able to promote your business too.

One of the ways you can do this on social media is to tell a story – in this case, a story about your customers. Storytelling and social media go hand in hand and there are so many different ways that you can create stories, like for example:

• Take a photo of your customers or what they achieved (like a new home, for example) and then write a text update – or a short blog post – where you share their (preferably happy) story
• Take a video of your customers talking about their story; for example, how they are saving money or how your business helped them, and so on
• Create a series: alternatively, you can even build a whole series of images and videos following some of your customers. For example, it could be their journey to saving enough money for a particular project they want

These types of content will help humanize your brand and will show your fans and followers how your company can help them to improve their life and their lifestyle.

Use content curation to boost engagement and followers

Another big reason why so many of us check our social media all the time is that we can find awesome content about the topics that interest us. In fact, social media has rapidly become one of the biggest sources of news for many people all over the world.

And the great news is, your business too can leverage this through content curation. Plus, it’s a great way to break up all of your social content – and keep things more interesting than only posting your own content.

When you curate content, there are a few different aspects that you need to keep in mind:

• Make sure any content you share is from a trusted, well-respected source
• All content shared needs to be completely relevant to your target audience: news that will have an impact on them and topics that they want to learn more about
• Personalize each curated update: whenever you share someone else’s content on your social profile, take the time to personalize the update. Start with the text update – that’s where you should share your own thoughts about the article of piece of news you’re sharing, make a controversial statement, or pick an interesting quote from the content. Plus, you can even create images specifically for this, like an image with a quote or a fact from the article

Or, you can build a hub where people know that they will consistently get amazing content from the finance industry; for example, you can use a tool like Flipboard to create a digital magazine which you then promote on your social profiles:

If you curate content carefully and make sure you only share the best and most interesting content, you could potentially create a hub where people know they can always go for the latest news and best content. That gives people a reason to engage with you for longer and most importantly for a financial company, it helps build trust in your company.

Conclusion

The finance industry definitely has its challenges when it comes to social media, like trying to keep thing interesting and fun and dealing with negative comments and customer service issues 24/7. But it’s also one of the best ways to connect with your audience in a more meaningful way, engage them, and grow their trust in your business.