FreshNetworks Blog

Capital One and American Express are the top financial services brands on Facebook, according to a chart compiled by social media analytics tool socialbakers.

While Capital One’s Facebook page features within the top 150 brands on this list, and the American Express Facebook page is just outside it, the next most successful financial services brand on Facebook is US based direct banking and payment services company Discover, which charts at the 300 mark, saying a lot about the use of Facebook among global financial services brands.

In fact, this forms a large part of the reason why Capital One and American Express are the top financial services brands on Facebook  - it’s the fact that they are on and engaging with their audience in the first place.

Plus, as both brands are credit card providers they have the opportunity to engage their audience with content that is not directly related to the financial world, ie, topics  related to the deals they have secured with other travel and leisure brands for example, or discussing areas where their customers and prospects may choose to put the spend on credit cards, like holidays or cars.

Using socialbakers to dig a bit deeper into the content and engagement strategy for both Capital One and and American Express reveals some interesting results.

An overview (to the left) of both Facebook pages shows that Capital One has 125, 813 more fans than American Express, which, in the grand scheme of things of the total number of fans they both have, is not that much of  a difference.

However, looking at the  ”people talking about” and engagement rate levels is where things get interesting.

American Express has over 10 times the number of people talking about them than Capital One, and an engagement rate that is triple that of Capital One. In fact, as the chart below shows, Capital One’s “people talking about” rate seems to be consistently low, with little sign of improving:

What’s interesting to note is that American Express had a similar level of “people talking about” to Capital One until a staggered increase from 15th December 2011 onwards and then a massive peak, and then subsequent slower increase,  from 23rd January this year.

The reason for this dramatic climb was likely to be the Facebook status update that advance tickets to the 2012 NBA All-Star Jam Session were available to all American Express Cardmembers.

In actual fact, it’s status updates along these lines that are the key driver for American Express’ high engagement levels. They don’t post regularly, and in fact have only posted content 5 times since the start of 2012, but their status updates are carefully crafted to ensure maximum engagement by highlighting the benefits of being an American Express cardholder.

In the mean time, ever since early September, Capital One has let their content strategy dip completely and they have  barely posted anything since. Previously posting regular content, almost on a daily basis, has probably helped to keep their ranking quite high in the socialbakers chart, but I wonder how much longer this will be the case. Their most recent post, back in early December read:

And having not posted since suggests some kind of unresolved technical or social media management error. This is not a good post to leave hanging at the top of the feed and someone from Capital One would do well to look into resolving the issue and adding new content, rather than leaving the page hanging.

With only one financial services brand in socialbakers top 150 Facebook pages chart it will be interesting to note how many other financial services brands start engaging through Facebook, and whether they have the same success as the likes of American Express.

You may’ve heard that supermarket behemoth Tesco has signed up for Foodie.fm – a service which has been dubbed by its backers as “the Facebook for grocers”.

Launched by technology firm Digital Foodie, Foodie.fm claims to be the first social network to offer a social shopping platform for grocers via a fully integrated checkout with www.tesco.com.

Having purchased social media company BzzAgent back in May last year,Tesco is certainly not shy about using social media as part of its wider business strategy, and their partnership with Foodie.fm looks like another way of embracing multichannel more effectively.

Foodie.fm, available as free app on iPhone, Android and Nokia applications, as well as via the Web and Facebook, enables users to make friends with other food lovers and to swap cooking tips and recipes. Visitors can create an editable shopping list, based around a meal, by clicking on photos of recipes. For example, if a user was to click on the recipe for beef burgers, the shopping list would consist of  mince meat, onions, salt, etc.

The Foodie.fm site then checks availability with Tesco before the order is placed, the customer pays and delivery is arranged.

At the core of Foodie.fm is a recommendation system that learns from a user’s eating and purchasing habits, and suggests recipes and groceries that match his or her ‘taste profile’. The system takes into account personal preferences like food allergies or intolerance, as well as any budgetary restrictions. This enables users to personalise their profile and allows the site to suggest recipes and groceries to match customer profiles. It is this customised shopping list that will help the consumer plan and budget for a week, or even month’s worth of meals, and the shopping that is needed for it, in one go.

Until now, food retailers and consumer packaged goods were somewhat sheltered from the toughening economy, with 40% of people spending more on groceries than 3 months ago (according to Deloitte) – a result not just determined by inflation, but the fact that the tough current economy means that people spending are more time at home cooking for themselves rather than eating out in bars and restaurants.

However, as Deloitte has pointed out in their recent Consumer Review,  40% of the value of all transactions in non-food retail are now digitally influenced, and it’s hard to believe this influence will not impact food and consumer packaged goods too moving forward.

With this in mind, food retailers would do well to explore options like Tesco’s partnership with Foodie.fm. Given the rise of the connected customer, retailers should look at strategies for integrating social and multichannel into their offering, and should look at ways at becoming an agile and fully engaged social business.

Often hailed as the top travel review aggregation site, TripAdvisor launched as an independent company on December 20th 2011 after separating from parent travel booking company Expedia.

With almost 1 in every 4 UK holidaymakers using Tripadvisor to research their holiday before booking, the success of TripAdvisor is undeniable in terms of SEO value, word-of-mouth and trusted reviews. And the valuation of TripAdvisor at nearly $4bn is testament to its success as a social travel site, highlighting the value of social media for the travel industry.

Although Expedia no longer has the main social arm of their business, this doesn’t mean they’re abandoning social media altogether; quiet the opposite in fact.

In a recent article in Businessweek, Expedia highlighted how it hopes to use the power of  social media to re-design the way people shop for their holidays by incorporating transactions into a marketplace driven by social networks.

With people trusting their friends’ opinions more than that of a company, Expedia is trying to emulate in the travel industry what Amazon has done in the consumer space with regards to personalisation and recommendations.

Expedia’s goal is to make planning the entire trip – from flights to hotel to transportation, to restaurant selections and amusement park tickets – an integrated shopping experience.

For example, say your family is planning a trip to Mexico. After booking flights, your hotel search would incorporate friends’ views on particular properties. If someone from your family had been to a particular restaurant, you’d get their recommendation or caution. And all those Facebook photos that people post after a trip? Expedia want to mine those to help consumers make decisions about their own travels, just as TripAdvisor does with hotel shots its users submit.

In essence, this means your friends, family and social network connections become the equivalent of the traditional ‘bricks-and-mortar‘ travel agent, providing both timely advice and warnings about certain elements of your holiday.

Expedia also plan to harness the power of blogging more effectively too. Expanded posts on travel adventures, supplemented with user reviews and comments, might draw in more travellers. And while they aren’t looking to add a roster of bloggers to its payroll, the company is likely to fund trips for bloggers it deems influential. They they would then use the bloggers’ videos, photos, and writing on the Expedia site, without influencing content.

So what can other travel brands learn from Expedia? Given that there’s ever-growing research to support the fact that social media impacts holiday choices, travel and leisure brands need to think about their social media strategy and how effective it is at actually delivering value to their company. Still in its infancy, Expedia is really only focusing on two key areas of social media – customer ratings and reviews and influencer marketing through their proposed blogger programme. Travel and leisure brands would do well to follow Expedia’s example and to focus efforts on the specific areas of social media give real business benefits.

From the Top 10 viral advertising campaigns, to the Top 10 marketing moments of 2011, the “Top 10 season” is definitely in full swing, so we thought we’d jump on the bandwagon and look at the Top 10 social media blog posts from 2011 on our blog.

1. 15 essential articles for online community managers
2. 23 social media collaboration platforms
3. Google+: A social networking site or the future of search engine marketing?
4. Tips from the team behind the UK’s third most engaging Facebook page
5. How do different age groups interact across the social web?
6. Coca-Cola cut ad spend by 6.6% and invest more in social media
7. Why retailer Tesco bought a social media company
8. The social media landscape in 2011 – an infographic
9. Forrester report: how companies listen and engage with social media
10. 6 tips for using social media as a customer service channel

While our top 10 social media blog posts list is based on the most shared blog posts, other favourites from the team include:

• Why people don’t want to create content for your brand
• Social media management tools wiki/list
• Brands need to use social media strategically, not get advice from gurus
• What are your social media photo rights? Image T&Cs examined
• Calling all brands: stop counting Facebook “likes” and build deeper engagement instead

As well as the free guides we launched on our blog:

• How to measure Twitter (using the API)
• How to secure your brand name on China’s Twitter, Sina Weibo
• Report: The growth, current use and future direction of LinkedIn

We hope you enjoy re-reading these posts and that they help to remind you of what an interesting year 2011 has been for social media.

Though there are several opportunities for using social media as a customer service channel, but while customers are using social media to lodge complaints, the majority of them are not receiving an acknowledgement or response from the service or product provider they are complaining about/to.

A few days ago, a piece of research conducted by Sage UK among 2,000 UK consumers found that while 22% of consumers would complain to a company using social media when they received a disappointing customer experience,  only 40% had received an acknowledgement as a result.

This is not just a problem over here in the UK. As reported in the Financial Times today, a survey carried out by social media management platform Conversocial in order to track US consumer expectations of social media found that while 51% of respondents were using social media to communicate with corporations,  a third of consumers who had attempted to communicate with companies via social networking sites were ignored.

Furthermore, 88% of respondents said they would be less likely to do business with that retailer if their complaint went unanswered.

With this in mind, businesses really need to make sure that their social media strategy assesses customer service otherwise they risk loosing not only existing customers, but also new customers, given that social media gives the casual observer the chance to see if, and how, a brand or business responds to a customer complaint.Social media makes the process of complaining a lot less confrontational and with the modern consumer expecting a better customer experience, businesses need to make sure they use social media in a way that adds value at all main customer touchpoints , including responding to complaints.

So why is there seemingly a reluctance to response to customer complaints in social media? Is it just that businesses are not listening out for complaints properly, or that they still don’t know how to respond? Perhaps it is still fear, in which case businesses need to start seeing the complaint as an opportunity to engage with the consumer directly, address their problem,  and then in some cases, turn a complainant into an advocate for the brand.

Either way, companies can’t afford to stick their fingers in their ears and ignore complaints or be slow to react to customers. As Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic of Goldsmiths University in London points out,  ”social media thrives on immediacy, so small issues can snowball very quickly if they are not responded to effectively and efficiently”.