Banking on Social Media
Authors:   , Bruin Jeannine M. , Van Knippenberg Daniel L 
Published: April 2022

Reflecting their conservative nature, banks lag other industries in leveraging social media, which has emerged as the fastest growing corporate marketing channel. Playing catch up, banks are making significant strategic investments in marketing through social media, but are their efforts effective? To explore this question, this research examined the content strategies of 39 large banks on the social networking site, Twitter, and evaluated whether bank strategies were effective at generating likes, shares and positive comments-common measures of audience engagement. Using the Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion as a theoretical framework for audience engagement on social media, this research examined content theme and topic, as well as peripheral content elements such as rich media; hashtags, mentions and hyperlinks; and posting frequency. This study also explored whether a bank's reputation moderated both what content strategies a bank pursued, as well as audience response to these strategies. Data comprised 4,001 social media posts from the U.S. Twitter sites of 39 banks during a 91-day period from January 1 to March 31, 2019. Controlling for the significant differences in content strategies across banks, this research found that content theme and topic were highly significant drivers of audience engagement, with corporate social responsibility content outperforming corporate ability content, despite banks posting significantly more about the latter. Examining peripheral content elements, video was the best-performing media type. Surprisingly, photos underperformed, primarily because banks heavily leveraged stock photos, especially with corporate ability content. Analyzing text-based interactive elements, mentions positively influenced audience engagement; hyperlinks had an unexpectedly negative impact on Twitter engagement; and hashtags were generally ineffective at producing engagement. This research also found diminishing returns for posting too often, but the larger problem is that most banks don't post often enough. Reputation influenced banks at the lower end of the spectrum to post proportionately more corporate social responsibility content, perhaps in an attempt to virtue signal. However, with respect to influencing audience engagement, a bank's reputation was not material. Furthermore, the level of engagement banks generated on Twitter had no influence in changing their near-term, future reputation. Banks are compelling research subjects because their services are essential to both individuals and institutions in modern society, yet consumers view banks poorly compared to most other industries. This dichotomy presents banks with a challenge: how best to market their products and services to an audience that needs them, but only reluctantly so. Bank social media strategies and effectiveness have scarcely been studied, leading to a knowledge gap that this research sought to address. The empirical insights from this study will help marketers build more effective social media content strategies. Findings also add to our understanding of what drives consumer engagement on social media and advance the study of marketing theory as applied to emerging digital channels.