People wonder why banks have social media accounts. And by “people” I mean not only the general public (i.e. customers of those banks) but also the staff that works in banks. After all, social media are about private life, memes and funny videos, right?
Social media can be a great platform for companies to present new products with exciting and enticing pictures – not the case of banks (seriously, try posting an enticing picture about a loan on our Facebook page). Social media can be a great platform for post-sales customer contact and problem solving – hard to do on a public channel when the topic is personal finances! So why would banks want to spend time and energy in entertaining social media accounts?
Simple: to stay in touch with you. Social media represent informal, two-way communication channels that allow banks to be closer to the general public than ever. It allows banks to show what they do next to their core business of banking: from recruiting and career development, through social engagement activities all the way to innovation and digital developments that make banking easier for you. Things you would otherwise only know about if you read long, dry annual results publications.
And, in one case, social media helped a taxi driver recover a failed payment. Long after taking his client to the desired destination, the taxi driver realised the transaction hadn’t actually gone through. Knowing the person was an ING employee, the driver turned to Twitter and wrote: “@ING_news Employee ING. London taxi Dorchester Hotel – London Wall. Card rejected today @14.47 in cab. Was it you? Please get in contact.”
ING is a multinational company with more than 52,000 employees worldwide, and a staff of several hundred work in our London office serving corporate and institutional clients. But the tweet was directed to our HQ corporate communications account “ING News” in Amsterdam. Trying to find that colleague travelling to London was like looking for a needle in a haystack!
But since our purpose is to empower people to stay a step ahead in life and in business our colleagues picked up phones and dispatched emails… and less than 24 hours later the colleague was found and the taxi debt repaid. It goes to show the power of the networks!
You can read the full Twitter conversation here: https://twitter.com/ING_news/timelines/721002943714091008
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