3 Keys to Successful Social Media Marketing

There’s no doubt social media has become an important channel for business growth. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 68% of U.S. adults are Facebook users and more than half of U.S. adults use the platform several times a day.

Most Americans also rely on social media to shop and inform themselves about products and services, including mortgages. The problem is relatively few credit unions are fully taking advantage of this trend. They may have social media accounts, but many fail to leverage these platforms to create targeted messaging to cultivate members for life.

At the same time, many credit unions may not know how to leverage social media, especially as new tools and innovations can make it more powerful than ever. Below are three keys to successful social media marketing that will empower your organization to deliver the right message at the right time to the right person.

Focus on Your Members

We’re all used to being marketed to on social media. The problem for marketers is breaking through all the “noise” consumers face every time they turn on their phones and devices. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are flush with advertising – most of which we ignore.

The trick to breaking through is to make the people you’re marketing to – your members – feel as though you are talking only to them. The good news is that consumers who belong to credit unions already have a positive view of these institutions. The way to use this advantage is to create customized messaging on social media that focuses on each member’s unique needs.

But how exactly do you do this? With the technology that’s available today, marketers can ensure specific social media posts are seen by specific groups of people. By doing so, they can ensure that members who are college grads under 30 years old will receive messages about buying a first home and not a reverse mortgage, for example.

Another benefit of social media is using direct messaging to create consistent outreach to individual followers. As consumer attention levels continue to decline, this tactic becomes that much more important. It’s often not enough to draw attention to your service offerings – you need to communicate directly with your members.

Building a relationship has nothing to do with how many followers you have, and everything to do with how effectively you communicate with them.

On social media, this means leveraging advanced levels of automation, customizable content and campaigns through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other platform your members and potential members use, then measuring the results. Are members sharing your posts with family and friends? Are your efforts translating into real ROI? With the right technology, it is possible to get the answers to these questions.

Stay Current, Be Active and Don’t Quit

On social media, consistency is king. Credit unions need to have the ability to schedule content posts to social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn. You should be posting and sending messages every single day, as well as reviewing social media impressions to see which posts and messages are being seen and heard.

With the right technology, even a novice marketer can be successful. It can generate reports and rank the results of your social media efforts. Technology also makes it much easier to leverage existing content from your custom-branded library of media images and messages, so that everyone on your team will come across as a social media expert.

Keep in mind, the social media landscape is constantly changing. For credit unions to succeed at growing business on social media, they need to stay on top of these trends and remain open to new strategies and tools created to get their messages in front of members. This means credit unions need to constantly look for new ways to improve their reach. If they don’t, their ability to develop key relationships online will eventually fade.

Don’t Neglect Compliance

Because social media has become such an integral tool for marketing, it’s also gotten the attention of regulators. Like all financial services organizations, credit unions must comply with state, federal and local laws; disclosures and licensing requirements. If you don’t think these agencies are increasingly paying attention to what lenders do on social media, think again.

Regardless of the amount of time or energy you spend on social media, you’re going to need a set of rules, policies and procedures for the people in your organization to follow – and you need the resources to monitor and enforce them when necessary. This is social media’s double-edged sword – most people use social media to have fun, relax and share a chuckle, but if your posts are not well-thought out, you could receive unwanted attention from regulators.

Every credit union that uses social media needs to establish policies and train staff on them. Parameters should be set for loan officers so they know what they can say and what they can’t, and your compliance department should be given clear direction on monitoring how staff members use social media, and when and how to address activities that fall outside of your policies.

One generally good policy on Facebook is to encourage your staff to keep their business pages separate from their personal pages. There are two reasons for this: First, the employee has one page that’s just for fun, not business. The second is that their business page can be monitored separately by the company, and all content can be approved before it’s posted.

With the right technology, such a policy enables management to provide advertisements, scripts and other marketing pieces for the credit union’s social media page that a loan officer can share on their business page. It also lets organizations lock down marketing text, so that certain messages cannot be edited prior to the loan officer posting it on their business page.

The bottom line is that social media plays a huge role in our personal and professional lives, and credit unions would be remiss not to take it seriously as a powerful communication tool. Almost to a fault, the most successful financial services organizations typically are the most active, consistent and adept at communicating with consumers via social media.

The challenge for any credit union is knowing that your members can take their wallet share elsewhere. With the right messaging sent consistently to the right member, you can build even stronger relationships and trust – increasing the odds that a member looking for financial services will think of you first.

Joe Welu is Founder and CEO for Total Expert. He can be reached at joe@totalexpert.com.