Banks' Facebook Performance Lagging LinkedIn

Harriet Davies

18 June 2012

Banks’ performance on Facebook lags their performance on the other key social media sites, according to a new survey from MyPrivateBanking Research.

Banks have a stronger presence on LinkedIn and YouTube than Facebook, despite the fact that Facebook is “the most popular social network,” the research firm says. It analyzed the social media activities of the world’s top 50 banks and found that 100 per cent are active on LinkedIn compared to 90 per cent on Facebook.

MyPrivateBanking also evaluated the quality of the banks’ presence on social media sites, and found that their presence on Facebook was “significantly lacking in quality.” Overall, the companies scored 67 out of a possible 100 points for their use of Facebook – lower than for all the other social media sites, including LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and Google Plus.

A “major weakness” is that banks are taking too long to respond to comments and private messages on Facebook.

“Of the banks using Facebook, 25 per cent never responded to a posted message by a test user and 40 per cent needed more than a day. Even worse, 85 per cent of the banks did not respond to an individual contact message via Facebook at all,” said MyPrivateBanking.

“Facebook is all about interactivity and this is what banks still do not get,” said Steffen Binder, research director of MyPrivateBanking Research. “If users rarely get timely responses on their messages, the Facebook presences is practically useless to them and the banks miss out on a great opportunity to engage the users and start a dialogue.”

By comparison, the banks’ LinkedIn presences had a clearer focus, the research found, with pages geared towards new recruits rather than potential or existing clients. Consequently, LinkedIn pages benefited from wider support within banks, as human resource departments have lobbied for a good presence on the social media site to support their hiring strategies.

Despite this positive sign, MyPrivateBanking urged banks to invest more in their social media profiles.

“A high-quality Facebook presence is the most difficult to achieve among the all social networks, but, with its enormous reach, also potentially the most rewarding,” said Binder. “As with their efforts in LinkedIn, banks need dedicated teams to maintain and continuously develop their Facebook presences and to ensure interactivity and freshness."