Bogotá, 28 July 2015.– According to the last report published by the software infrastructure developer Latinia, which dedicated a special chapter to ‘Social Networks’ in this year’s annual report on Mobile Banking, a Facebook user interacts in Latin America up to 5 times more with the financial institution they follow compared to a Twitter user. Latinia has broken down the data for up to 100 financial institutions in the region for both Social Networks.
“We have analyzed, amongst other metrics, the level of interaction a user has with the institutions it follows. That is, it does not take into account the bank’s own activity or posts, which is easy to quantify but does not represent the existence of real demand, but rather their followers’ interaction with these posts, namely standard user interactions: “likes”, shares, comments, retweets or mentions of what has been posted, over a specific timeframe (a week), among the total number of followers this institution has. We believe that this statistic indicates the quality of the community just as much as user or customer interaction on the platform chosen by the bank, the so-called engagement rate. Measuring how the social channel competes in its user interaction against other channels, from branches’, to Apps, to any other kind of customer service, over the period of a week seemed to be the most realistic way to approach the comparative analysis”, the report’s authors stated. In the case of Facebook, over 36 million followers of 95 institutions were analyzed, and on Twitter, about 5.2 million followers of 105 banks.
The first undeniable fact presented by the chart regarding user activity with financial institutions on one network or another, is that Facebook wins hands down. It is quite remarkable to see how Facebook users in Central America follow their banks, en masse, against the small number of followers on Twitter; Mexico being the only exception to this rule, where the number of users on Twitter did in fact surpass those on Facebook. “If we consider an ER of 0.5 to 1% as a more than valid measurement, banks in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and especially in Costa Rica, would benefit from developing the role social media platforms play in their multi-channel strategy further. Social networks are an undisputed milestone in the digitization process of Latin American financial institutions and, we shouldn´t forget, an irreversible phenomenon worldwide”, Latinia states.
“We have notably witnessed many cases of banks, especially on Facebook, in the phase of undertaking social involvement, that is to say, real interaction between the bank´s customers and its products. Much of the time these are complaints, but they are also opportunities for creating a real dialogue. Users spend a large part of their day on social networks; financial institutions should take advantage of these time windows. Facebook opened up on a tab for 8 hours a day on any web browser is an invitation for dialogue; that is where your customer is and where he/she spends their day. However, the idea of social banking goes one step further: specific services need to be designed for use on social networks; this channel should not substitute home-banking nor local branch operations, but should serve as one more personal and operating channel. We believe that some banks have this at their fingertips”, conclude the authors of this study.