How Your Bank Can Benefit From Using Twitter
While Jack Dorsey and the whole Twitter team continue to celebrate their successful 5th anniversary, I would like to take a minute or two to contribute a few ways that Twitter will help you stay in touch with your customers and current financial services industry and payments industry news.
Before you dismiss Twitter and cross it off as just another social media fad, you’ll agree with me that the following statistics are impressive:
3 years, 2 months and 1 day: This is the time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
1 week: This is the current amount of time it takes users to add another billion Tweets.
460,000: The average number of new accounts opened per day in February 2011.
I’ll admit I was once a person who thought of Twitter as primarily a way to share thoughts on a new restaurant, interesting articles you came across, or to comment on your favorite sports team’s game. However, now Twitter is about more than just entertainment. When properly leveraged, it can be a very useful business tool for quickly sharing information, gathering information about your competitors and building relationships with current customers, as well as potential new ones.
If you are a new Twitter user, you may not be sure where or how to get started. One way to get started with Twitter is to use it as a tool to stay current on payments industry news. Below I have listed a handful of informative publications and organizations I follow that use Twitter to assist in promoting their latest news and analysis:
American Banker – @AmerBanker
Bank Technology News – @BankTechNews
Independent Community Bankers Association – @icbanews
ABA Banking Journal – @ABABankingJourn
Electronic Transactions Association (ETA) – @ElecTranAssoc
NetBanker – @netbanker
BAI – @BAI_Info
You should also follow your payment processing company and other service providers (if they are on Twitter). Login to Twitter and start a search for them by name or by their official Twitter handle (starts with @) then click the “Follow” button. Next, visit your Twitter home page where you’ll see the most recent stream of tweets from the companies and people you follow. Then when you come across an interesting headline, simply click on the link to read the full article.
Twitter also easily provides access to the latest payments industry news when you’re on the move with their mobile apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows 7 phones. That way you can quickly check Tweets when you have a few seconds and keep up with the latest news and more.
Are you still skeptical about Twitter? I suggest taking 15-30 minutes to give it a try. I’m sure you’ll be surprised at what you find.
