Find out how ANZ is Minting Engagement on Social Media
Darsana Vijay
August 19, 2016 • 5 min read
Updated on May 5, 2017
Banks are increasingly taking social media by storm (and surprise). You’d be amazed to know that quite a few banks are doing exciting stuff on social media. Let’s take a look at some of the top banks in Australia.
In this post, I explore the social media habits of Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, Westpac, NAB and ME Bank. I will be focusing on their performance on Facebook during the month of July 2016.
You can take a quick look at the TL;DR version and then take a deep-dive into how we evaluated their social media performance.
Takeaways
ANZ has the lead in Likes, Comments, and Shares and has the most Reach. Their Posts during the month of July alone reached around 1.6 million people and got over 2.5 million impressions. ANZ’s outstanding social media performance offers up a few tips.
- Know your audience: It goes to the credit of ANZ that they have something for everybody. Along with the usual service updates about Android Pay etc, they ran multiple campaigns. The #InspiringLocals campaign, that spanned from June 28th to August 4th witnessed some pretty engaging Posts, like this one.
- Promotion strategy: Taking off from the example above, backing shareable content with promotion is a smart move. Merely putting money behind Posts will not get you consistent engagement or Reach.
- Show how happening your brand is: ANZ published 27 Posts in the month of July, which is way more than any other brand studied here. Their strategy of posting more content wins because they aren’t merely recycling old content. The different events that the brand is part of, from basketball matches to Facebook Live sessions to offers are engaging because it portrays a brand that is constantly up to something.
Engagement
Take a look at the Likes, Comments, and Shares that each of these brands received per Post.
ANZ’s engagement as a measure of Likes, Comments, and Shares seems even more impressive when you take into account the fact that they had more Posts than any other bank in this group. They also had the lead in all these metrics.
In order to get a better idea of what ANZ (and the other top banks) are doing right on Social Media, let’s check out their most engaging Posts.
(We ranked these Posts based on their Engagement Score. The Unmetric Engagement Score is an estimate out of a maximum 1,000 of the engagement received by a brand. This takes into account Likes, Comments, Shares as well as the number of people likely to have seen the Post).
Top Posts
NAB
This Post received over 3,000 Reactions. But the reason why it ranked so high on Engagement, is because it got a lot of Comments. Most users felt that the message was poorly communicated and made a point contrary to what the bank was going for. To NAB’s credit, they were extremely consistent and patient, replying to most of these comments.
The next most engaging Post from this brand was also a video. This too won a lot in terms of Likes and other Reactions and witnessed a lot of Comments. I was quite curious to find out why they got so many Comments per Post. It turns out that they do not allow User Posts, resulting in a barrage of angry Comments unrelated to the content (and mostly about the service).
ANZ
The folks in charge of social at ANZ might not face any dearth of topics to write about. Sporting events, especially those which happen on a national scale are big crowd-pullers. ANZ comes across as a brand that is committed to arts, sports, sustainability and the society. Content that focuses on such events, as opposed to ad campaigns is working out well for this brand. The 6 Posts under this category have an engagement score of 911.
ME Bank
ME Bank set an example on how brands can benefit a lot from real-time marketing. By taking part in the Pokemon Go craze that broke the internet, they succeeded in relating to their Fans. You can see something similar in this Post as well. ME Bank gets brownie points from their Fans by talking to them like any other friend on Facebook. By inviting their Fans to tag a friend, they are extending the Reach of this Post (and driving the engagement up, on account of Comments).
Promotion
By now we all know that stellar performance on social media involves at least some degree of promotion. Brands that do exceedingly well back their solid content with some money to extend the Post’s Reach.
You can detect which of your competitors’ Posts are promoted within Analyze now. Here’s a detailed look at the promotion habits of these banking brands.
ANZ had the most Promoted Posts, while NAB had the most Organic Posts.
ME Bank’s Promoted Posts had the highest engagement, while ANZ Australia had the highest engaging Organic Posts. Most of ANZ’s Organic Posts were brand news, an email hoax that’s doing the rounds, scheduled maintenance and the like. ME Bank promoted three out of their four Posts.
ANZ Australia published the highest number of Promoted Posts while NAB saw the biggest surge in engagement.
Take a look at the engagement they received over the course of the month. The dollar sign indicates Posts with money behind them.
Notice the clear overlap of spurts in engagement with Promotion.
Except for Commonwealth Bank, they all seem to be promoting a large chunk of their social media content. It seems to be paying off as well.
Do you want to see how your brand gets engaging on Social? Get one-click reports in a matter of minutes using Analyze.
