66% of world’s biggest banks closed to social media opportunities

Nearly two thirds of the world’s leading banks do not have a consistent and comprehensive strategic approach toward social media, new research has found.

According to the report “Wealth Management and Social Media” from myprivatebanking.com, the majority of leading banks and wealth managers have failed to harness the potential of social media, resulting in no presence whatever on social media networks, or only occasional engagement in sporadic activities.

Only 40% of the banks surveyed use some type of social media such as a blog, podcast or videocasts or social bookmarking on their company websites and 19 out of 30 banks have no official Facebook presence targeted towards their customers.

Alarmingly, even the banks with the best social media strategies have little or no activities targeted towards attractive client groups such as wealth management clients.

The report notes that if every wealth manager was present and active in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr. This measure alone would give banks access to close to 1 billion individuals at very low cost. However, in order for this to happen, the leadership of banks have to open up to social media and plan exactly how their company should position itself in the various social media.

The report concludes that banks urgently need a strategy for defining their presence in this interactive phase in the development of the internet.

The findings support the conclusions of our own research carried out in May this year, which suggests that slow adoption of social media channels by FTSE 100 companies is limiting their potential influence on investors and ultimately share price.