Opening Your Credit Union’s Social Media Eyes
Social media is about connecting with your audience by sharing great information and sometimes you can do that by telling some awesome stories.
This is our second year of doing an all-out social media campaign for Americas Credit Union Conference (ACUC). This year’s location in New York City’s borough of Manhattan gave us a chance to stretch our social legs and explore the credit union/financial stories of the city – with a twist. We wanted to give the social media reins over to our audience so they could decide the stories we covered. The idea, in its simplest form, was to create visual stories on Vine (the 6-second video app) and our audience voted where we would go to lead us to a final destination with an expanded story on Google+.
Trying new ways of engaging our audience on social media is always a little scary, but we found out that they were totally willing to be the puppet master and control what we did! Our engagement levels were about where we thought they’d be – meaning a handful of you followed our every move and voted – and a lot of you decided to sit back and watch what happened. That’s fine. But the ramifications of this type of social engagement has opened the eyes of several credit unions. And that’s what we wanted!
Since ACUC, we’ve witnessed a number of credit unions setting up Vine accounts and using it to promote what’s happening inside the walls of the credit union. For example, Aimee Johnson of Oswego County FCU in New York has started using Vine to promote her credit union’s new “Campout for Savings” campaign. Check it out!
We don’t pretend to be absolute experts at social media stuff. But what we do want to accomplish is open the eyes of those running social media platforms at credit unions, to see that trying new things to engage members is not only fun, but a worthwhile effort to discover what engages their membership and even potential members to embrace the value of credit unions.
What we do on Twitter, Google+, Vine, LinkedIn or whatever platform is really for you. So please steal our ideas, our execution techniques, whatever we do – just make it your own so it reflects the personality of your credit union. Your members will love you for it.
