Your Credit Union’s Social Media Questions
Now that summer is coming to a close and the hope of a normal schedule tries to return to our lives, it’s good time to take a step back from the social media tornado we work in every day. We are asked lots of questions all the time about social media and how we do what we do. I’d like to share with you the top three questions we (our team of Holly Fearing and me) are asked by credit unions about social media. Oh, and I’ve written the answers too – that seems like the nice thing to do.
How closely do you need to work with compliance?
Our compliance team (I have no idea how many there are up on the 4th floor) are quite awesome to work with. We stay in touch with them often on different issues. They were critical in helping us create a social media policy for the company. Here’s the deal: we avoid any compliance issues because we use our social media platforms to just share information and have a conversation – we never sell products or services on Twitter or Google+. Why? Two reasons – for one, I think it’s stupid to do that for our audience. For two, every post mentioning a product or service would have to be complied! That would be a nightmare.
What tools to you use for posting?
We use Hootsuite for scheduling our Twitter feed each day. Personally, I’d rather use TweetDeck, but I lost that argument. Oh well. Our posting day tends to start around 5:30 CST each morning, Monday through Friday, and ends around 7 o’clock each evening. We start that early because the east coast is already up and chatting. We end the day around that time because that’s just when the west coast is getting off work. Depending on the day, we post anywhere from 12 to 30 times. For our updates on Google+ and LinkedIn, we do those manually on each site. Hootsuite is a little iffy with those posts.
Our credit union blocks us from all social media activity at work. How do we change that?
This issue can (possibly) be resolved by working with legal, compliance, IT, marketing and your executives to create a social media policy. It’s tough, but it’s a conversation where all parties need to come together and have some social media therapy to talk through fears, concerns and goals. The thing is, the world continues to move and communicate while you’re having your “What if?” conversations. What I’ve seen work is when credit unions take baby steps so all parties can see that the world isn’t going to come crashing down because you’ve unblocked Twitter.
We appreciate all of the feedback and questions we get. And if you ever have question, please ask! We are huge talkers.
