¶14 March, 2009

Banks and Credit Unions on Twitter

If you haven’t been following Twitter the last few months, you may not realize it now has almost eight million monthly unique visitors according to Compete. That’s almost double the traffic it had just two months ago and a nearly a nine-fold gain from a year ago.

To put that traffic in perspective, it’s more than half that of the NY Times and slightly more than banking giant Wachovia (see Compete chart below).

Banking activity
Financial institutions are pretty new to the micro-blogging platform. In a search today, we found 13 U.S. banks and 14 credit unions with active Twitter feeds (see note 1). There were also and eight international banks for a total of 35.

See the table below for the non-inclusive list ranked by number of Twitter users that follow the bank’s feed (note 2). Wachovia (now owned by Wells Fargo), the only major bank that has promoted Twitter on its main website, leads with 2,000 followers (see previous post on Wachovia’s foray on to Twitter).

Opportunity
Participating in Twitter is a low-cost entry into social media that can actually help save a customer relationship or three. Compared to blogging, it is much less labor intensive. It’s also less of a marketing platform given the 140-character limit in posts. But in the current environment, perhaps less truly is more. By all means, find a gung-ho Facebook devotee in your bank and let him or her get you into the Tweeting game .

NameTwitter URL (4)UpdatesFollowers1. Wachovia (Wells Fargo)/wachovia2572,0582. Bank of America/bofa_help5571,4863. Wells Fargo/wellsfargo4 (note 3)

548

—Via http://www.netbanker.com/2009/03/banks_and_credit_unions_on_twitter.html