My Marketing Strategy
Nicolette Lemmon, President & Founder
For several months, I have been noticing a shift, a change in the Twittersphere. As I have monitored several key words, client names, and my “follow” list, there seemed to be three things happening:
- Less tweets from everyone with some disappearing altogether
- Less new followers except more suspect or pornographic scammers
- Less interesting tweets but lots of article links
A recent statistic in the blogosphere cited that of the 75 million users set up on Twitter, only 15 million globally are considered active. The determination of “active” was did “some” tweets in the last quarter of 2009. According to Twitterati, the activity on Twitter has been declining since last July. Plus, a high percentage of tweets came from only 50,000 Twitter handles.
For our credit union clients, the idea of using Twitter originally was twofold; one aspect to monitor for customer service issues, and the other to present interesting information out to build conversations.
It has become apparent to me that it’s hard to use Twitter as a customer service tool for credit unions. Rarely does someone use the name of the credit union, favoring the generic term “credit union” instead.
While Bank of America has experienced success using Twitter as a customer service tool, they also have a significantly larger customer base. Despite my monitoring efforts on Twitter, I have yet to see specific credit union customer service issues come to light this way.
Regarding the tweets from the credit union to its universe of Twitter followers, it is good to use financial education tips and sometimes promotions for tweets. However, the key is that Twitter is a social medium and who really wants to be social with their financial institution?
As with every new innovation, there will be a point where the frenetic interest wanes and there is a settling of what the best use of the medium is. Right now, the value of being “on Twitter” still seems to be the halo effect that you or your company is progressive. And, that you (or your brand) are youthful in terms of embracing new things.
What are you noticing at your financial institution? Has Twitter been helpful as a customer service tool?