Banks and other financial institutions are slow to harness social media and digital technologies, even though their employees regularly apply these tools in their work lives, a recent VantageScore Solutions survey revealed.
The survey, commissioned by VantageScore Solutions and conducted by SourceMedia Research in conjunction with the monthly Index of Banking Activity, encompassed more than 250 professionals in a wide range of job titles and departmental functions at institutions including commercial and regional banks, credit unions and merchant banks.
Among the findings on social media:
- More than 75 percent of respondents reported that both their institutions, and they themselves as individuals, had used the four major social media platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, in some connection with their work.
- LinkedIn, the professional networking service, is the most widely used platform, having been tried by 86 percent of institutions and 90 percent of individual respondents.
- Asked to rate each of the four platforms as “important,” “neutral” or “not important” to both their institutions and themselves individually, respondents rated only LinkedIn as “important” overall. Forty-seven percent of individual respondents, as well as 46 percent of respondents whose institutions use it, deemed the service “important.”
- Fewer than 25 percent reported that their institutions have tasked one or more employees with posting content in an official capacity to Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn. Thirty-eight percent of respondents said they have someone assigned to post to Facebook, and nearly as many, 37 percent, said they have no one assigned to post to social media.
- Consistent with widely recognized best practices for social media, more institutions may be getting started by listening in, to “read the conversation,” before they start posting. Forty-nine percent of institutions track Facebook, 38 percent monitor LinkedIn and 30 percent follow Twitter. Twenty-eight percent say they don’t monitor any social channels.
The survey also revealed that traditional downloadable and streaming digital content was much more widespread, as more than 95 percent of respondents reported visiting websites for mainstream and industry-specific news outlets, professional organizations, and agency or regulator sites.
In terms of content types, more than 87 percent rated webinars and streaming video as “important” for work-related content; 80 percent rated survey and market-trend data as “important” data they seek online; 75 percent identified white papers and journal articles as “important,” and 60 percent rated presentation slides and decks as important.
VantageScore Solutions will continue to track usage of social and digital media within the lending community, to help shape our offerings for the professionals we serve. As appropriate, we will also share our findings with readers of The Score and subscribers to our social media channels.