4 Powerful Ways to Leverage Social Media in Financial Services

The inflexibility in traditional ethos and complexity in regulatory structure being some of the primary reasons, the financial services sector hasn’t been able to fully exploit the growing benefits of social media. But with changing business landscape, the realm of financial services has made a head-way to maximize the role of social media into its integrated operations and services. Having lagged behind other industries for a long time, financial institutions today are looking to utilize social media to gain a competitive advantage, while at the same time trying to mitigate the threats posed by it. The emergence of Financial Technology (FinTech) as a unique industry in itself is a proof of this rejuvenated approach. Finance firms are quickly moving to adopt a strategy that can enhance and optimize their systems and structure to adapt to their social media initiatives. While comprehensive adoption of social media is an ideal way to move forward, financial institutions can categorize their initiatives into the following effective ways, when it comes to leveraging its advantages.

Understanding of customer preferences

Social media channels like Facebook and Twitter are now offering a range of services to the users who have made them an essential part of their personal and professional lives. As people are willing to seek the advice from cognitive parties on their financial matters through social media channels, financial institutions can use this as an opportunity to engage with their potential customers. This will let them offer their products and services to the consumers in a more personalized way. Through constant engagement and analyses, financial institutions can use the social channels to modify their solutions for every unique customer-segment which has its own preferences; this can be taken to an extent that they can design whole new deliverables for them based on these preferences. Barclaycard’s Ring MasterCard, is an example, that was created through crowd-sourcing after users selected the best features through votes. This is one of the noted examples of utilizing the power of social media in nurturing to the exact demands of products and services in a highly intuitive industry of financial services.

Maximizing Customer Experience

Social media has grown to be one of the most sort-after means for retails customers to interact with the financial institutions. After having leveraged various other channels to offer real-time solutions to their customers, financial institutions are finding it tangible to make use of social media to tackle their customer grievances and needs in a better way. This has led them to append the primary social channels like Facebook and Twitter into their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. While the level of integration depends from partial to complete, most of the finance firms are optimistic about using them to address the intrinsic demands of their retail customers. However, while security remains to be a concern, financial firms are working over-time to make their systems robust and completely integrated with social media to deliver exceptional customer experience.

Optimizing Organizational Strategy

As traditional mindset of financial firms has given way to more pragmatic approach of utilizing social media, there is a paradigm shift towards deriving an organizational-policy that compliments their social strategy. By binding together the disparate silos across various departments of sales, operations, marketing, customer service etc., financial firms are remodeling their overall approach that is far more social and customer-centric. The stratagem is bound to dictate the utility of social media to integrate the departments that are currently functioning independently.

Employee Skill Enhancement

The primary step in executing the social media strategy is to upgrade the skills of the employees who would implement it on behalf of the organization. When adequately educated about the various aspects involved in optimizing their social endeavor, they can deliver results that are more tangible and tractable. Financial firms can further evolve a competitive advantage that can give them an edge over the competitors and help them achieve the goals attached to their social media initiatives.

Key Takeaways

• The growing status of social media has led the financial institutions today to utilize it to gain a competitive advantage.
• Through their social media commitments, financial firms can penetrate customer-segments with special preferences to modify their solutions and also create new ones.
• Financial firms can append the primary social channels into their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to deliver enhanced customer experience.
• An organizational strategy that compliments their social media presence can help financial firm to evolve a competitive advantage to achieve their business objectives.