Banks Still Struggling to be Sociable

Photo credit – telegraph.co.uk

News that the banks are scaling back their spend on social media makes for some scaremongering headlines.

‘Is This The Data That Finally Proves Social Marketing Is Bunk?‘ says Robert Tyson in the Tyson Report, and ‘Businesses are right to be turning away from social media‘ says Digital Media Editor Emma Barnett in the Telegraph.

Tyson suggests that the banks will soon ‘find’ somewhere to reinvest their savings, and that it will be in email marketing.

Barnett suggests that the transparency of social media has just added fuel to the fatcat fire, following several high-profile news stories.

Are banks a good indicator of social trends? Should business be scaling back their spend as 2013 approaches?

The problem with banks, and it happens to businesses large and small up and down the country, is that they’ve thrown too much cash at it, expecting it to extract them from between the rock and the hard place.

The marketers have convinced them they need to be doing ‘social media’ without convincing them they need to clean up their act, modernise their business practices, or use it as a ‘channel for change’.

Yes, email on the whole will, for a while yet, be a better digital marketing tool. Print and TV will continue to be lucrative for banks for some time too.

Social media would have been the perfect opportunity for banks to focus on their customers and sort out some of the negative publicity they’ve attracted, but instead, the industry is still awash with story of fat cats, big bonuses and other shareable topics. Did no one tell them social media was transparent?

I’ve seen a few people raging about their banks on Twitter recently, but have seen no responses from the corporate giants and meaningless numbers have followed through their threats and jumped ship.

Yes, social media is an amazing customer service tool, is does pretty well at marketing too if you know how to sell your products.

But at the end of the day, if you don’t inspire any confidence in your customers, they’ll simply lose interest, pun intended.

Social media is an enhancer. If you’re doing things right, Twitter et al are great for spreading the good word, and if you’re doing things badly, that will spread too. Scaling down social media spend is just another knee-jerk reaction to a knee-jerk reaction.

The actual problem lies elsewhere.

Could banks have done things differently to see more success on social media? Do you care whether your bank is on Twitter or not? Leave a comment and let us know!

Enjoying reading The Social Penguin Blog? Why not subscribe to our RSS, follow us on Twitter or join Dave on Facebook.