Engage Your Social Media Audience in 2022 – How Engaging Are You?

The financial services industry is competitive and if you are in this industry you are doing whatever you can to stand out and reach your audience. What we are finding is, one of the best places to engage with your audience is on social media. The key is creating a strategy with attention-grabbing content that simply can’t be ignored.  

The magic key to creating that strategy is by looking at social media best practices and leveraging the best of the best to engage your audience as we roll into 2022.

So before I go on, I have a question that I want you to keep in mind: How engaging are you?

Here are my top 5 most engaging social media practices that I want you to keep top of mind:

1. Create contests, giveaways, and polls
2. Share educational content
3. Train employees to be advocates
4. Celebrate company milestones
5. Advertise

Create contests, giveaways, and polls

These three are just a few of my favorite things. A great way to engage with customers is to create contests, giveaways, and polls. Let’s say your main goal is to increase more foot traffic at a specific bank location. Create a contest that invites people into the branch to participate. The more you can get them to engage, and don’t forget to relate the contest to social media, the better. The key to a great social media contest is promoting the prize and clearly stating what the contest is. 

You can also do something similar with a giveaway. Let’s say your credit unions 40th anniversary is coming up and you want real testimonials on why people love you. Create a social post encouraging people to comment and share their favorite memory of the credit union for a chance to win a gift card, gift, or cash!

Polls are a solid way to engage an audience on a budget. Let’s say you want to be more active on Instagram, but your team doesn’t have the time to make the content. Consider launching fun polls once or twice a week! Think of fun “this or that” questions that people would want to vote on. Just because you’re a financial institution doesn’t mean you can’t branch out. It can be a seasonal poll: Which is better — pumpkin spice or apple? As long as you’re connecting with your audience and putting some personality behind the brand, you can create polls for anything!

One important detail to keep in mind is compliance. Be sure to check your local and federal compliance requirements and outline that in your social media strategy so your team knows what’s okay to post. 

Share educational content

As a financial institution, you’re in a special place where people are whole-heartedly trusting you with their money, and not many businesses can say that. Your customers are already looking to you as a leader, whether they know it or not. 

People love learning and they love learning from brands and businesses they look up to. Consider sharing educational content and use social media to promote it. If you’re a bank, for example, that creates content already, social media is the perfect place to share it. If you don’t, that’s okay! Feel free to use outside content, but always credit the source.  

Some ideas for content: 

• Blog article: How to increase your credit score
• Infographic: A guide to buying a home
• Checklist PDF: Documents to have when you apply for an auto loan

Providing this content in a social post or a multiple post series is a great way to share this information! If you have more time and resources, you can create branded guides or infographics. The more you can position yourself as a thought leader, the more likely your customers will bring more business to you later. 

Train employees to be advocates

With a little training, bank tellers and loan officers can be your biggest social media advocates. Encourage employees to share on their pages, tag your institution, and even use hashtags. Depending on their social media use, they may need additional training for each social media platform. 

What should they post about? Well, they can share posts about company initiatives, campaigns or giveaways, and outings with a personal perspective. This brings more personality to your financial institution so you’re not just like everybody else.

Celebrate company milestones

While your social media channels should be about what customers want to learn or see, you should also share big company milestones. If it’s your bank’s tenth anniversary, make a post about it and include a shoutout to customers. If your beloved credit union president is retiring after serving for 50 years, share a post about that and most importantly include a photo. Sharing these company milestones gives your audience a nice break from the financial content and helps them bridge the gap between you as a business and you as a personality.

Advertise

If you’ve tried all these social media best practices and have started seeing results, it may be time to move onto something bigger: ads. Social media ads are a great way to maximize goals for specific campaigns or to find new customers. Set aside a monthly budget dedicated to a campaign and outline measurable goals. 

If this is too far of a stretch, then start by dabbling in boosting your posts. Putting dollars towards strategic posts ensures more people will see them and interact with them and will give your posts that boost that they might need. 

Now reflect back on that question I asked you at the very beginning, how engaging are you?

Social media is growing and changing every year. The more you can stay on top of these trends, the easier it’ll be to adapt new ones, engage with your audience, and grow your social media channels. 

We just went over my top 5 most engaging social media practices that you can start implementing now to give yourself a kickstart in 2022:

1. Create contests, giveaways, and polls
2. Share educational content
3. Train employees to be advocates
4. Celebrate company milestones
5. Advertise

In case you missed it, read the five ways to build trust and share value on social media. 

By visiting KidGlov.com/finance. We are here to assist you with all things marketing to ensure your success on all platforms.