Banks keeping a tab on Facebook, Twitter accounts to lure customers

Rahul Parikh

Aditi, 27, who had just joined a sports channel in the programming department didn’t know that a simple Facebook post would have surprising consequences. All that she did post on Facebook was that she wanted to buy a new TV and liked a few pages that gave tips on what to look for when you buy a TV. After just a couple of days, all the ads that she could see on her Facebook page were banks selling her personal loans or credit cards that offered easy EMI at almost 0% interest rates.

Anyone else who is not really a tech-media friendly person would love to cook up a theory to think that Facebook is literally spying on her. But it’s not just with her. It’s actually spying on each and every one of us.

Our social media profiles have become mirror images of ourselves on the world of internet. So, it was only gradual that marketers would try to capitalise on the fact that people, especially youngsters, would be much more open on their Facebook walls than they would’ve been in a formal setup like in a bank or while applying for a loan. That’s where social media listening or like I prefer to call it, ‘social media intelligence’ would come into play. It has been sometime since Facebook has allowed targeted advertisements based on a person’s interest which is a win-win situation for both marketers and the consumers.

For marketers, it opens a whole new dimension of targeted advertising that will minimise costs and only reach to the relevant audiences. For consumers, it will mean getting offers/services that are most relevant to them instead of being bombarded by multiple and mostly irrelevant advertisements.

According to the data provided by Facebook, for the top 100 pages that used interest targeting during March 2015, interest-targeted posts received approximately 290% more likes per impression, 79% more comments per impression and 54% more shares per impression than non-targeted posts.

Intelligent crawlers that track a person’s internet usage and then serve him targeted advertisements on his social networks are also one of the marketer’s favourite tools. This type of remarketing is mostly used by travel portals that track your searches and then suggest you targeted advertisements. For e.g., if you search for flights from Mumbai to Delhi on a leading travel portal and exit the website without doing any transaction, the crawlers identify the activity and throw up customised advertisements that appear on your facebook wall saying ‘Cheapest fares for Mumbai-Delhi available at ABCD.com’.

Not being limited to this, social media intelligence has another important aspect to it. When a marketer wants to be relevant to his audience, he also has to keep his ears and eyes open on customer feedback that he gets and should be dynamic enough to customise his offerings or respond to the customers in an effective and simple manner. Today, brands/companies, especially in the finserv space, use social media as more of a broadcasting tool than a tool to engage customers/fans in a conversation.

Social media helps you to make your brand more human and friendly than what a website can be. Using social media to post and respond like a human is the first step to making your brand likeable. Brands need social media to enrich, differentiate and improve their reputation.

How many times have we been put off by an auto-responder message on social media that speaks an entirely different language than what we do in our everyday lives? Brands need to move away from the typical, ‘Dear ABCD, your complaint has been registered and the docket number is: ______’. A social brand is not meant to talk like that.

Not that it’s impossible to build such connect. There are international examples of finserv brands building that kind of connect with their consumers. One of the most commendable examples can be simple, an American direct bank that provides electronic-only banking facilities across America. It’s social conversations on its Facebook and Twitter pages are human, likeable, sometimes even funny.

This is not to state that brands need to be informal and post whatever they want on social media. But, they can be proved to be much more immersive as brands and are likely to be on top-of-the-mind of the customer if he is really engaged to the brand through the social channels. And being on top-of-the-mind is what a company really wants right?

The author is Head of MyUniverse, Aditya Birla Money. The views expressed in this article are his own