Managing Social Media Assets: How Banks Harness Communications for Strategy

The goal of this study is to explore the current state of the customer-facing social media engagement of financial institutions and deduce actionable public relations recommendations for industry participants.;The innovation of a social media strategy is determined by two components, social media users responding to the strategy and the company implementing it. Firstly, the social media strategy's effectiveness is best determined by a large and active user base that approves or disapproves of certain public relations approaches by engaging in a positive or negative way. The second component to the effectiveness of social media marketing is how corporations implement advanced strategies on social media channels. Outside of China, the U.S., both from a consumer and a corporate perspective, represents a pioneer of social media marketing. The most globally-prevalent social media platforms, including, among others, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, originated in the U.S. and are actively used by U.S. consumers. Social media trends, for instance user bases or popularity of social platforms, often first emerge in the U.S. before spilling over to other markets. Major U.S. corporations, including consumer-based financial institutions, are embracing the social media arena as a powerful and rising public relations tool to manage their corporate reputations and foster customer relationships.;The effects of social media marketing on reputation, capital and consumer trust can hardly be quantified in sales numbers or market shares. Practitioners and scholars are recognizing that a return on engagement - as opposed to a return on investment - provides valuable insight into how to leverage social media effectively. This study focuses on the U.S. social media market, which has high levels of innovation and adoption from both its user and corporate sides, and aims to serve as a benchmark study for other global markets. The level of user engagement serves as the main indicator in assessing the effectiveness of social media strategies.;The author sampled four major U.S. banks and qualitatively analyzed their social media activities on Twitter and Facebook during September 2013. She scrutinized the collected data for reoccurring engagement patterns and their underlying causes. The content analysis was followed by an in-depth interview with the industry expert Ron Piovesan, Vice President of Strategic Alliances for Hearsay Social, to gain a further understanding of areas that the content analysis data could not entirely exploit.;By combining insights from prior research with the primary research of this study, the author deduced actionable public relations recommendations to guide financial institutions toward successful social media marketing.