UK banks on Twitter…where exactly are they?
While doing some research into the insurance industry and social media for one of our clients, I decided to look sideways to see what was going on in other sectors where there are consumer facing finance brands – in particular in banking.
I mean, you’d think that with all the bad press they’d had over the past two years that UK banks would want to open up Twitter as another customer engagement channel. And over in the US, there’s a Computer Weekly article from over a year back talking about how banks over there have indeed been getting on board.
Sadly the banking industry might well be another example of where we lag behind the States in brand social media adoption. Check out some of the examples below. A quick search on Google and Twitter search for their Twitter handles produced the following.
First of all Royal Bank of Scotland, the recipient of an enormous bail-out and now majority owned by the UK tax payer. Well…they have at the very least put up a Twitter feed to advertise jobs.
But a feed for the group as a whole? Doesn’t look like it, and old Roe Serrano, whoever s/he is, is sitting happily on what should be the group ID. As a result I suspect that the Twitter RBS jobs ID was something established as a freelance effort by someone in their HR team, rather than as part of any coordinated strategy.
Then we move onto Lloyds, now also the owner of a group that includes Halifax and Bank of Scotland. No, various searches for Lloyds Bank or the Banking Group produce nothing on Twitter. And if we look specifically at the Lloyds TSB part of the operation? We get this:
Um…somehow I don’t think that’s the real Lloyds TSB! However, someone/somewhere within Lloyds did obviously plan at some point to take a few IDs and do something with them:
So how about Barclays? Not much going on there:
Then I thought about Smile Bank, an Internet bank here in the UK that was something of a pioneer ten years ago or so and likes to think of itself as progressive (it’s owned by the cooperative).
Nice one, Dongchan Park, I wonder whether you specifically wanted to reserve Smile’s name or whether you just nabbed what thought was a generic ID that would be of general interest to a bank.
And finally moving onto HSBC, which on its website has published an article all about the joys of businesses using Twitter: “A really effective way to get your website seen is to create yourself a
twitter account. It is free and you can post links and talk about your
business and show off your expertise.”
Like Royal Bank of Scotland it has a careers Twitter ID. And it’s also currently running a promotion on Twitter about ‘fresh business thinking’ called 100 thoughts (essentially tweet out your business pearls of wisdom).
However twitter.com/hsbc is currently suspended, which might mean it was brandjacked and HSBC has tried to get it back. It’s also difficult to see what the score is with twitter.com/hsbc_com. Is it an official account? If so, it hasn’t been used since August.
Hats off though to HSBC’s subsidiary company First Direct, where Amanda Brown and Rebecca Hirst seem to be one of the exceptions to the UK Twitter rule:
Note, this was a fairly unscientific look at what banks do just by going into search.
Some of them might have feeds somewhere that have a customer service or PR orientation, but the point is if I can’t find it, neither will the average consumer. And though I took a cross section of bank brands, a look at others such as the Cooperative Bank or Banco Santander produces similar results to the ones above.
Update – thanks to @cashquestions for pointing me to the ING Feed in the UK, which is at @ezonomics
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Thanks for the comment @britishbankers, and good to hear Twitter is working for you, hopefully more of your members will follow suit soon
British Bankers’ Association here. Very, very interesting stuff.
Now it’s obviously down to each of our members to adopt whatever communications strategy it wishes. And the banks’ comms people and their consultants will know all about social media, even if the frontline staff are largely behind rigorously policed firewalls.
But I would like to wave the BBA’s flag meekly. For more than a year now, we have been tweeting a daily LIBOR fixing as well as links to all of our publications, press releases, blogs, youtube videos, whatever. What we do is all there.
And we also engage avidly with our followers, and anyone else we spot doing anything of interest.
We were fairly late adopters (we started tweeting in April 2009) so we didn’t get the chance to tweet as @bba, but we did register two Twitter names – @BritishBankers and @BBALIBOR – so we should be easy enough to find.
I know we’re not a bank, nor can we provide the kind of direct bank-to-customer accountability you are looking for, but we are certainly using Twitter and it is certainly working.
Thanks Joe and Simon. Saffron Building Society (disclosure: I’m their Head of Marketing) are really loving the opportunity to talk with more of our members, potential members and journalists via Twitter and our other social channels at –
http://www.facebook.com/saffronbs
http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1021932
http://www.youtube.com/saffronbs
Thanks again for the support.
Thanks Joe and Simon for the comments.
Some really nice stuff from @saffronbs, though as Joe says (and this is not to take anything away from the job you guys have done) smaller players are doing the running as the larger ones are too risk shy. So it will indeed take one to break ranks for the others too follow.
As I said in the post though, the same attitude doesn’t apply in the US. To take just one example: http://twitter.com/bofa_help
Not only do Saffron Building Society (disclosure: client of Lansons Communications) tweet it out via @SaffronBS, they also have two other accounts:
@TheBridesBigDay – “wedding tips and tricks for those planning their Big Day plus a healthy dollop of celebrity gossip”.plus
@CountThePennies – “all the top money and personal finance news in one place”
Furthermore, with the Saffron you also get this rarity too: a CEO of a building soceity who tweets – check out @andy_golding. He also blogs here too: http://www.saffronbs.co.uk/blog/ (including a recent post on how their social media work Saffron’s Social Media fits into their overall strategy).
It’s true, banks are at this stage still scared of twitter and unwilling to engage directly with their public en masse. First Direct is obviously the exception to the rule although it is primarily PR-driven with a bit of customer service thrown in. My view is that banks don’t just need one twitter feed, they need a whole bunch – you wouldn’t have just one phone number would you?! Kudos should also go to @SaffronBS for showing the bigger building societies how it is done.
Once one of the big banks makes a proper go of it, the others will all follow. The problem may well be that the key-decision makers in banks either see it as too risky or they don’t know which part of the bank should own this initiative. Similar issues to the ones that we have faced at L&G but we are nuturing social media within corp comms with the intention of helping other parts of the organisation get on board when we have figured out the parameters. @JoeWi