On this episode, I look at how to decide which social media platforms make sense for your credit union.
Listen now or read the transcript below.
Also scroll to the bottom to see a resource to help you integrate your staff into your social media plan.
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to episode four of the CU social strategy podcast. This is your host, Jennifer Roland Cadiente.
And today, we’re going to talk about how to decide which social media platforms you should be a part of.
So we’ll start with, you know, the big one right now x, formerly known as Twitter, that’s such a common one for us all to use, because, you know, it’s, it’s well established. Many of our people are on there, it’s relatively easy, you don’t have to post images, if you don’t want to, you can just post text, you know, and again, because it’s just been around so long, we’re all so used to using it. You know, I know a lot of changes have been made, since it was purchased, and the name changed. So some businesses are moving away from using it as much. Some influencers are moving away from using it as much they keep their accounts open, so that if they are paid to do something there, they can fulfill that obligation. But it’s not a place that they’re actively posting. So it’s one that we need to really keep looking at. Because you don’t, you know, if you’re paying for advertising, you certainly don’t want to be appearing close to posts that are upsetting to you know, your, your members, your staff. So keep monitoring that one, I do think it remains a good one to be active on because, again, so many of us are using it. And even though, you know, some people are leaving, I still log into it every day. You know, I know a lot of people do. So I would advise if you are using it already, keep using it. Just keep monitoring what you’re appearing next to and how much engagement you’re getting. If you find that your members are moving away, then there’s really no point in spending a lot of time engaging on there.
And so I think that that leads us to the sort of the general principles, I just wanted to make sure that we talked about Twitter, because it remains, you know, the big question mark for all of us in social media right now. But the general principles in deciding where you should be spending your time on social media is, you know, first, where are your members. If you know that your members are using a specific platform a lot, you’re going to want to be there. If they’re not, then you know, you move to the bare minimum, move away completely. There’s just no point for us to be spending our limited time on places that are not getting us any benefit. The other thing to look at is whether you enjoy using it. If you hate creating social media posts for a certain platform, then you know, maybe you shouldn’t be the one doing it. Maybe you should look for someone else on your team or an outside person to help you with that. If you do feel like it’s a valuable platform to be on. And fight the final consideration is how much time do you have? You know, in a perfect world, we would have time to create completely custom pieces that work best for each of the platforms. You may live in a perfect world but I know that I don’t end my the people the credit union people that I work with also do not. So we have to make choices about where we think we’re getting the most benefit for the time that we’re spending. So the top platforms that I see many credit unions using are still x, or Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, I do see a lot more getting on Tik Tok.
I haven’t really seen anyone using threads so far. And Pinterest is, you know, half and half. Some people use it, some people don’t. One of the clients that I work with outside of the credit union world actually has found that she gets a ton of traffic from Pinterest, even though she never posts there. And that’s simply because she makes sure that everything that she posts, all the images are Pinterest friendly, so that people can just click a button and post it on Pinterest and share her messaging that way. And that’s how she gets traffic.
So that’s something to, you know, to make sure that you’re doing on your website. When you have promotions or when your blog posts, make sure that you have shareable items in there. There are some really easy plugins to make that happen if you’re using WordPress, or another another platform. Squarespace I know has it built in a lot of the more custom platforms that that we’re using in the credit union world can absolutely get that functionality built in.
And sometimes it’s just a matter of clicking a checkbox here to make sure that it that it happens. So
I really like plugins that will create an automatic tweet.
So that people can just click on a little highlighted quote and just send that out to people. I mentioned the Pinterest plugins that make your images easily shareable, including a featured image on your posts, makes it really easy when people share a post to make sure that the image that you want is showing up. And you know, if you’ve noticed, sometimes people will just quickly post something and then it gets like this weird, like distorted image of your logo, or things like that. So making sure that you have a featured image on your pages and your posts. Whenever possible, we’ll make sure that the image that goes with your promotion, or information is the one that shows up on the social media feeds. So going back to that the you know, the first principle is where are your members posting, where are you remember spending their time. And that can be a little bit hard to find out. If you know that most of your members are within a certain age range, a certain income level, other demographic, things like that you can make some good educated guesses based on just general statistics. But one of the ways that I really like to, to figure it out is just to ask them. If you do a an annual member survey, you can include that on there. Depending on how many other questions you have, and how much other information you might be gathering that that might be more important to leadership than knowing which social media platforms your members love and use. You can ask on those platforms, obviously you can ask in a statement insert. If you you know, for the people that you mail paper statements to, you can have your staff ask, you know, we do those blitzes, where you know, we update phone numbers and email addresses and mailing addresses. You can do a blitz to ask what social media people use. So that anytime someone comes in, they get asked and your staff can be gathering that information on a really easy survey for you, or an easy, you know, box inside the member Relationship Manager tool that your research team can pull at the end of the Blitz period. Then you can make the decisions. You know, if all your people are all about TikTok and you haven’t been spending a lot of time on TikTok, then you know, maybe it’s time to just start figuring that out. I do feel like that is one of the harder ones not because it’s hard to use TikTok but because you really have to be doing video. And I’ve seen some that I just love where people let their staff create fun videos of you know what it’s like applying for a loan, what it’s like coming in and joining and I think those can be great and those are the ones that I do see a lot of engagement on a lot of views when I’m looking on Tik Tok for credit union videos.
So I think that’s something really important is to get your staff involved not just your marketing team, and not just any outside contractors that You’re working with but the frontline people that are talking to members every day, like they know what your members want, what your members need, and what questions they’re asking. So even if you don’t need them to help you create content, you know, get, get them to send you the questions that they’re hearing every now and again, ask at a staff meeting, for people to email you, or have a form that they can fill out. Anything that makes it really easy to keep that line of communication open, you’re gonna get some really great ideas for social media. And I know that beyond you know, your monthly and quarterly promotions, sometimes it can be really hard to think of ideas to post on social media. So getting that feedback from your frontline staff is going to be crucial. You know, also, if you’re a part of balance, or see your content, they have some great, great ideas that are targeted to, you know, different times of year and things so that you can get some ideas about what to share, and some content starters. Because that’s another thing is like, you know, you just you have trouble getting started writing that post, even if you’ve got a great idea for the topic it should be on. So make use of all the resources that you have, when you are deciding what to post on each of the platforms. And, you know, even if you’re not finding a ton of engagement, if you have automated tools that can help you keep active on a social media platform so that, you know, if it picks up one day, you’ll still be there. You know, Hootsuite is a really common one, social Pro, there are a lot of things out there that will let you just set it and forget it and schedule your posts out for you know, a week, a month, whatever, whatever works for you. I do like to keep things a little bit custom for each platform. You know, like when you’re creating an automatic post for Instagram, make sure that you say you know, check the link in the bio, or if you’re using link tree or something like that to give multiple links. If it’s Facebook, you can make a little bit longer like you can on Instagram. I go back and forth on hashtags on Facebook. I don’t think they’re super useful. I don’t think they hurt anything. I don’t always like how they look on a Facebook post. But they’re crucial on Instagram and Twitter. And on Twitter, you know and Facebook, you want to make sure you’re including the links so that people can can get directly to the information that you want to share with them. So make sure you got the links in the captions when you’re scheduling and posting organically on those.
Thank you for joining us today for the CU social strategy podcast. You can make sure that you’re signed up for the mailing list so that you don’t miss out on any new episodes or any new social media tips and tricks that that I come up with that link is there in the show notes. If you have any future episode topics that you would like to have me cover or have any specific questions. You can email me at jennifer@jennifer-roland.com. See you soon. Bye bye
Resource
I interviewed Tansley Stearns about using staff to help provide support on social media, and some of the tips she offered will be useful as you look at how to start using staff to drive social media more. Read it here.