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Social Media Research for UK Banks - listening to customers the easy way

Social Media Research for UK Banks - listening to customers the easy way

If, like me, you have a love/hate relationship with the organisations that you bank with, then occasionally you may be moved to comment about them. People used to write letters or pick up the phone to register complaints or praise. Nowadays letter writing seems to be a dying art and unless you like listening to pan-pipes while you are put on hold interminably, the phone is often used as last resort.

In the digital age, if you wish to make your views known about your bank or any other service for that matter, then it’s done on the internet. Whether it’s a quick tweet commenting on the queues at your local branch or discussing the best interest rates on a financial forum, the public’s praise and opprobrium is now documented for all to see on the internet. Therefore all brands and banks in particular (as they seem to provoke extreme views in people!) need to be very careful how they manage their online reputation.

Of course if I were a bank I would be very interested to see what is being said about my brand and my competitors in public. But here lies the problem, because so much is being posted on the internet each and every day – how do I get an overview of what is positive and negative about my brand? How can I filter out what is unimportant? And despite the deluge of comments on the net each day, what would really help is summary analysis of data for a whole year, in order to reduce the impact of seasonal anomalies and fluctuations.

Capturing an entire year’s worth of internet conversations and making sense of them, interpreting them and creating actionable insights from them is no simple matter and yet DigitalMR have done just that with their UK Banking Social Media Report. It analysed over 200,000 bank related comments, posts and mentions on the internet for all of the UK’s key banks across January to December 2011.

It provides a window into the banking world from a customer’s perspective. For the first time banks will be able to view what is being said about them across the entire year: which bank attracted the most comment, praise and criticism, and what customers think about the different services they offer.

The report includes recommendations for all the key banks and strategies to help them make better business decisions from more effectively analysing the comments people make on the internet.




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