I look at the 80-20 rule for social media posts and discuss whether it makes sense for credit unions.
Listen now or read the transcript below.
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the CU Social Strategy Podcast. This is your host, Jennifer Roland Cadiente, and this podcast is for credit union marketers who want to make the most of their time on social media to be the most effective for their credit union.
This week, I want to talk about the 80-20 rule. Sometimes it feels like there are about 500 80-20 rules for business. But this one is about social media.
For a long time, people were saying that when you post on social media 80% of those posts should be fun or educational, and only 20% should be business things. And the more that social media usage has changed, and the more that I’ve been doing this for credit unions, I’ve found that that’s really not a very helpful mix. So I like to spend about 50-50 on, you know, credit union promotions versus financial education, community outreach, and just fun engagement posts. So for promotions, you know, we all know what those are, those are our loan promotions, our checking and savings accounts. I like to tie those really closely to the pieces that you’re sending out in other media. So if you’re doing ads, if you’re doing if you still do printed statement inserts, or if you make an electronic statement insert that goes along with your statement, or if you’re doing it all, as an email, you know, try to use the same imagery, the same taglines so that everything is really cohesive, across every place that you’re talking to members.
And it’s okay to spend more than 20% of your time on social media talking about your promotions. Your promotions are designed to help people you know save money on a loan or earn more money on their savings, save money on fees when they switch to your credit union. So although it is self-serving, it is also of service. And I found that if credit unions try to fit all of that into 20% of what they’re posting, they end up having to post a lot. And that ends up being you know, really time consuming to manage for staff or for me as the freelance content strategist. So it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
But what are you going to do with that other 50%? I mentioned your community outreach. If you give away scholarships, you could do one post on each scholarship recipient. You can do lots of posts when it’s time to apply. You can do posts about filling out the FAFSA, for your students that are getting ready to go to college or who are in college and need to fill that out every year. You can use your materials from you know, if you’re part of Balance, Balance gives you some tools that you can send out on social media. CU Content also has some great financial education pieces. You can also get inspiration and ideas from posts on the CFPB website.
And then just kind of to round it out every month. I like to do some of the you know the fun days, like when it’s pizza day, ask people for their favorite pizza place locally. And post a fun picture of a pizza. I’ve seen some credit unions do some fun Tiktok videos of you know what it’s like to come into the credit union and join what it’s like to move a loan to the credit union. So those are promotional so they would go in your first 50% for loans and things like that, but the joining the credit union you can count that as part of your your educational pieces to try to round out what you’re doing, I’ve seen a lot of people do a meet the staff member or meet the board member. And those can be a lot of fun. Where you just have, you know, the picture of the person, and five facts about them, including which branch they work at, or whether they are in the back office, which department they’re working in.
So there are a lot of fun things that you can do to make your social media not feel like all it’s doing is selling the credit union.
And what I recommend is, you know, if you really cannot figure out what to do with social media, look at what some of your peers are doing. You know, look at your local credit unions, see what they’re doing. Search for other credit unions throughout the country. Look for the ones that have a lot of followers and see what they’re doing right look at the ones that on tic tac are getting a lot of views of their videos. Because you’re going to see a really wide range of view numbers on credit union video, some credit unions get very little engagement, some get tons of engagement. So look at the people that are getting a lot of engagement and see what it is they’re doing, and see how that’s going to work for your credit union, and your membership and your community.
Then if you have other questions about social media, you know, feel free to contact me you can leave a voice message. If you have a question that you’d like me to address in a future episode, or you can use the coaching links on my website if you want to book some time to get a social media audit or just talk suit, talk through some things about your social media accounts. I look forward to hearing from you. And I’ll talk to you soon.