New Research From Unmetric Reveals Banking Industry Social Media Trends

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Content with helpful financial tips and retirement planning information resonates well with bank customers on social media

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Unmetric, the leading brand-focused social media intelligence company, today released new research that shows how 23 banks doing business in the U.S. have embraced social media and the trends that have emerged in the industry over the past five years.

The banks analyzed in Unmetric’s report across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram include: Wells Fargo, Bank of America, BB&T, Chase, Comerica, Huntington, BBVA Compass, Capital One, Citi, Citizens Bank, Fifth Third Bank, PNC, M&T Bank, Regions, Santander, TD Bank, Union Bank, SunTrust, KeyBank, Bank of the West, Umpqua Bank, Harris Bank, and US Bank. The insights from the report were the result from analysis of 27.6 million user interactions across 304,818 pieces of brand content.

Unmetric Discover, a searchable database of over 500,000,000 pieces of brand content, surfaced the most popular topics that banks talked about on social media in the last five years.

Financial tips form a key pillar of social media content for banks and were used in 31,200 posts. Fifth Third bank’s post that encouraged parents to educate their kids about financial planning resonated well and was one of the most liked posts in the category.

Retirement savings is another common topic for banks on social media. Regions Bank did a post encouraging recent graduates to start planning for retirement citing that 70% of Millennials are already saving, and the average person starts saving at 22. It was the most engaging post around the topic of retirement.

Banks have a far larger average audience size on Facebook than any other social network. With an average of 650,000 fans, it’s more than three times larger than the average audience on LinkedIn. For many industries, brands to not have a large LinkedIn presence. However, with an average of 187,000 followers per bank, LinkedIn should play an essential part in any bank’s social media strategy. Surprisingly, only 10 banks analyzed in the report had an Instagram presence. The average audience size is just 16,000 but is growing at a rate of 27%.

Other Key Trends Include:

  • Total social media content published by banks is falling.

There was a 44% drop in content since Q2 of 2014. Each year since has seen a pronounced drop in social content from banks with the biggest casualty being Facebook. Banks have gone from publishing a maximum of 60 posts per quarter to 18. Wells Fargo publishes 95% less content on Facebook than it did in 2013, but an exception to the trend is Santander US, which now publishes twice as much content compared to 2013.

  • Banks are generating more interaction on their content.

There was an 80% increase in interactions per post since 2013. Capital One dominates on Facebook with content garnering 317,904 interactions on its 79 posts in 2017. Bank of America lead the way for total interactions on its Instagram content in 2017, but Wells Fargo generates twice the amount of interactions per post.

  • Video content grows in importance for the banking industry.

There was a 631% increase in video content published by banks since 2013. 59% of TD Bank US’ posts on Facebook were videos in 2017. BMO Harris Bank was a close second with 56% of posts being videos. Capital One generated the most interactions on its videos published on Twitter, but its animated GIFs saw almost four times more interactions per tweet.

  • Banks are replying to more tweets and doing so faster.

There was a 55% increase in replies on Twitter by banks since 2013. Bank of America’s customer support handles replies to around 170 tweets per day. 38% of tweets are replied to within 15 minutes. TD Bank had the fastest response time. It replied to over 3,100 tweets in an average of 43 minutes, and 75% of those tweets were replied to within 15 minutes.

The full report with additional data and insights is available as a free download here.

About Unmetric
Unmetric, an enterprise solution for branded content analysis and discovery, harvests social brand signals to help digital marketers, analysts, and content strategists to analyze, discover and track branded content in order to create better content and campaigns of their own. Hundreds of the world’s largest and respected brands and digital agencies including American Airlines, The Chicago Bulls, Tiffany & Co., General Motors, GroupM, and Ogilvy use Unmetric to access AI-powered insights from the owned channels of over 100,000 qualified brands across more than 30 sectors on all major social networks including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in New York City with offices in Chennai, India and the U.S. For more information, visit http://www.unmetric.com.

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Peter Moran
Indicate Media
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