Social Media Marketing Essay: Commonwealth Bank Of Australia

Discuss about the Social Media Marketing Of CBA.

Active social media presence is significant for now in all types of businesses. Social media networks provide an advantage to drive the target audiences of the organisations. Moreover, using social media networks for business can boost the website's SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). For a bank, through social media marketing, it can improve to have a higher conversation to customers, to increase the traffic and to develop bank loyalty. The aim of the report is to highlight the social media presence and social media marketing techniques of Commonwealth Bank of Australia. In the first section, the social media presence and audience profiles will be explained. In the later section, social media marketing strategies will be described with current statistics. Moreover, ethics, security and privacy policies of social media will also be analysed in the final section.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is a public bank of Australia and it is a multinational bank. This bank has branches across United States, Fiji, New Zealand, the UK and other Asian Countries. Headquarter of the bank is situated in Sydney, Australia. CBA has more than 1100 branches across the world and was established in the year 1911 as a government bank. Then, in the year 1991, this bank became public company. CBA works in retail banking services, institutional banking and markets, business and private banking and wealth management (Commbank.com.au, 2017). Moreover, CBA offers finance and insurance, corporate banking, consumer banking, private equity, investment management, mortgages and credit cards facilities to the consumers. In the last year 2016, the revenue of the bank was AUD 24.58 billion. This is the largest company in Australia that is listed on Australia Securities Exchange. In addition, Commonwealth Bank Australia wants to have high conversion rates, good marketing ROI, and increase website traffics through social media marketing.

Now, the most of the people are getting tech-savvy and in case of Australia, maximum people are using social media. It is very much easy now to reach the people through social media network and it is cost effective. Through social media, CBA got unexpected growth in Australia and in the Asian countries. CBA has its own website and in this website, the customer can find links through which they can join CBA's social media pages. Customers can join Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Google+ and You Tube. Commonwealth Bank Australia loves to hear from customers and the organisation gives plenty of chances to the customers to stay in touch (Commbank.com.au, 2017).

Social media presence of Commonwealth Bank of Australia

In case of Facebook, CBA has currently more than 739,900 likes and more than 5,500 Facebook users visited the Facebook page of CBA. As it is finance based company, the organisation wants to reach people and teach people about financial literacy and services and products they offer. Most interestingly, CBA reached 100,000 Facebook users within one year of launching their Facebook page. CBA's customer service team try to respond each of the queries in real-time basis posted on the Facebook page or in the inbox. This has enabled the traditional customer service provision of the over-the-counter policy.

In case of Twitter, CBA has its account named #CommBank and they have been active on Twitter since May 2008. On the Twitter, this bank has more than 80.7K followers and the organisation twitted 36.7K. The organisation follows more than 4K through twitters. Most importantly, the management has decided to be active on Twitter like Facebook in order to engage more users and market the services and products. In addition, in case of LinkedIn, CBA has its presence and users can find them using the catch word Commonwealth Bank on LinkedIn for career opportunities and like to access industry experts for any queries.

In Instagram, it is the latest sensation for the digital age and most of the young generation use this social media for posting images and videos. CBA has been using this social media network since its beginning. The users can find CBA using @CommBank. This bank posted more than 700 posts and has followers of 13.K. The funny images, creative GIFs and relevant videos make this social media page attractive for users.

Moreover, this bank has You Tube channel and customers can subscribe these channels. CBA has two You Tube channels for the users, CommBank Business Channel and CommBank Channel for spreading the knowledge of financial tools, tutorials and tips to invest money in the bank.

Additionally, in Snapchat, users can find CBA by using key words ‘CommBankSnaps’. Here, the customers can find the relevant news of company, community, legal and business aspects of the organisation. Lastly, in Google+, the customers can find CBA by using CommBank and CBA posts images and news of services and products through Google+ for the users.

Purpose of social media marketing is to reach the target audiences and increase the customer base of the organisation for a bank (Tuten & Solomon, 2014). Social media marketing falls under internal marketing strategy of the organisation and the overall objectives remain same. The target audiences of a bank are to grab the future customers of the organisation. CBA post various images, discount offers, financial news and videos in order to reach the customers and the users of social networks may get interested for being a part of CBA. CBA joined social media to target specific demographics or psychographic segmentation of the customers. They use the strategy to ask the users to comment on posts and they personalise the business. In this case, Facebook creates a part of banking and its social media strategy is to create a community to interact the customers through online. The target audiences are customers of the CBA bank make them loyal to the bank in any kind of investments. Moreover, the audiences of CBA in social media are new start-up ventures people to generate funding. The target of CBA in social media can be investors who want to invest in business in the banking sectors. The common people are the target audience and number of these audiences is bigger than others. The users may want to know about private equity, mortgage and interest rate, the customer service team are there to solve the issues when these are posted on social media pages. 56% of the social media users log into social media pages more than 5 times a day and 84% of the Australian adults access the internet on daily basis (Sensei.com, 2017).

Social media audience of Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Table: Daily use of social network

(Source: Cio.com.au, 2017)

The CEO of CBA demanded that the strategy of CBA is to build bridges between customers and banking services through social media networks, not to just make an echo-chamber. In case of CBA, the customer engages rate through social media extends to 20% last year (Smartcompany.com.au, 2017). CBA is one of the top most banks in the world who have customers to use online banking services. More than 1.75 million Australians use NetBank in each day. In order to reach customers, CBA uses mainly content strategies that attract the customers.

Social media presence of a bank gives opportunities to create the meaningful connection to the users and customers. The marketing through social media helps to lure desirable consumers that must support the organisational goals. The management of bank tracks the ROI in social media marketing as well. Social Media marketing of Commonwealth Bank Australia is based on mainly content marketing strategy. They generally use attractive contents in order to engage maximum users on social media pages. Promoting a service or product of CBA, they use mainly content marketing strategy to create connections on social media pages. 44% of the social media users like to read engaging contents on social media if they are beneficial for them (Ashley & Tuten, 2015). CBA tries to being personal in content marketing and asks the customers to share likes and comment on the posts.

In last Ashes series, when Australia whitewashed England, CBA used impressing content marketing through social media. CBA made short videos on cricketers’ caricatures and they used mimicked voices to it (Scott, 2015). Content marketing of Commonwealth Bank Australia pushed the target markets through this and that can share the knowledge of the users through social media. This content strategy on social media pages like Facebook, Twitter and CBA used this subtle way that could inform the potential customers to engage on their posts. In addition, CBA uses CSR techniques through social media marketing and they use the tactic of ‘Community Seeds. They ask the customers to generate $125,000 for the six different communities through Facebook in order to develop the community life (Dwivedi, Kapoor & Chen, 2015). Through Facebook, the organisation started a campaign in opening savings account for all. CBA uses the strategy to give way gifts for the winners of any competition. CBA distributed EMI music voucher, movie voucher and gift coupons for the customers. CBA used the strategy of ‘Time Vault’, through which the users of Facebook needed to give the right answers about company’s history posted on Facebook page each day.

Social media marketing of Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Everything that an individual does online is getting public and one cannot ‘delete' this forever. An organisation must know about the consequences of taking any action through social media. Privacy of the customers or any users should not be penetrated through social media. Commonwealth Bank shared their ideas that they never posted any distort news or any images that can hurt the sentiment of any particular class and people. In recent time, Commonwealth Bank faced the issue of ethics when in two pages of employment policy, they wrote about employees' responsibility on posting on social media pages about CBA (Lovelock & Patterson, 2015). CBA declared that no employees can post anything negative about CBA on social media. However, legal experts fired back as they say that no organisation can ever interfere with someone's personal expression.  Moreover, inappropriate images and news about CBA on social media pages can harm the brand loyalty of the bank and it may also pose marketing of customer expectation. CBA has customer support team to solve the issue when it is posted on social media before it is getting viral. CBA does not do unsupported endorsement and compromise about consumer privacy. When CBA uses to collect consumer behaviour data, they do not compromise with privacy (Gordon et al. 2016).

In case of security, CBA claims that they never steal the identity of the users and share personal information of any users on social media pages. Any kind of personal discussion is done through ‘personal inbox’ and not in comment section publicly. Any kind of hacking and spamming of email are not entertained by the IT cell of the CBA (Hyder, 2016). CBA does not share any URL on social media pages that can be vulnerable to the customers. CBA itself uses link scanner to be secure.

Business organisations are no longer use social media for only communication purposes, however, social media analytics are now capturing in the industry, especially in the financial sector to analyse the data. Most of the organisations trying to capture competitive advantage through social media marketing. Content strategy, sharing link or optimising the SEO, these strategies can be evaluated through social media analytical tools (Chang, Yu & Lu, 2015). Financial Technology (FinTech) is one such tool that can be used to gather financial information on social media pages. Woolworths, the largest retail of Australia takes help from Socialbakers analytical tools to analyse the engagement of the customers on social media pages (Smartcompany.com.au, 2017). However, Commonwealth Bank Australia does not use any social media technology to analyse their social media performance. CBA just uses social media pages like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, You Tube and all. Buffer is a tool that makes a schedule for posting contents on social media pages according to customer engagement. Buffer analyses that most numbers of Facebook users become online on Friday. In addition, Agora Pulse is an interesting analytical tool that helps the professionals to posts on three social media at a time.

Conclusions

In recent days, social media is taken as best tool in order to connect with customers of the organisation. With consistent updating of the services and products on social media can help to increase the market share and customer base. It is observed that CBA uses traditional social media strategy of content marketing. However, social media presence of CBA is strong and they have customer service department in order to give replies to social media queries. The social media marketing of CBA boosts the advertisement of this bank as it is cost effective. CIO of CBA, Michael Hate opined that they provide real time posts on social media. On the contrary, it is observed that the organisation has been facing challenges in the analysis of social media performance as they do not have social media analytics and social media analytical tools within the organisation.

Setting up chat times:

It is needed for CBA to connect the customers at personal level and setting up chat time (on live) is very important. Customers and potential future customers have various questions regarding investment opportunities in CBA, if they can chat with customer support team over voices or through messages would be helpful. Giving thoughtful answers to the customers’ queries will definitely increase social media presence.

Introduction of social media analytics:

CBA must use social media analytical tool in their organisation and in order to continue using, CBA needs to hire skilled analytics. In order to gain a competitive edge, CBA can use these tools help to gauge the customers’ sentiment and monitor the performance of the organisation on social media platforms.

Tie in blog posts:

CBA posts short and relatively catchy contents on social media pages as people do not have enough time to read long contents. However, if a customer wants to know the financial benefits, financial services of CBA, blog posts would be perfect. Blog posts links can be shared on social media that will make more financial literate customers.

References

Ashley, C., & Tuten, T. (2015). Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory study of branded social content and consumer engagement. Psychology & Marketing, 32(1), 15-27.

CBA in hot water over social media policy - SmartCompany. (2017). SmartCompany. Retrieved 6 September 2017, from https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/advice/startupsmart-legal/cba-in-hot-water-over-social-media-policy/

Chang, Y. T., Yu, H., & Lu, H. P. (2015). Persuasive messages, popularity cohesion, and message diffusion in social media marketing. Journal of Business Research, 68(4), 777-782.

Dwivedi, Y. K., Kapoor, K. K., & Chen, H. (2015). Social media marketing and advertising. The Marketing Review, 15(3), 289-309.

Facebook, H. (2017). How to kick start your social media strategy — Commonwealth Bank focusses on Facebook. CIO. Retrieved 6 September 2017, from https://www.cio.com.au/article/412478/how_kick_start_your_social_media_strategy_commonwealth_bank_focusses_facebook/

Gordon, R., Gordon, R., Zainuddin, N., Zainuddin, N., Magee, C., & Magee, C. (2016). Unlocking the potential of branding in social marketing services: utilising brand personality and brand personality appeal. Journal of Services Marketing, 30(1), 48-62.

Hyder, S. (2016). The zen of social media marketing: An easier way to build credibility, generate buzz, and increase revenue. BenBella Books, Inc.

Kasemsap, K. (2014). The role of social media in the knowledge-based organizations. Integrating social media into business practice, applications, management, and models, 2(1), 254-275.

Lovelock, C., & Patterson, P. (2015). Services marketing. Sydney: Pearson Australia.

Scott, D. M. (2015). The new rules of marketing and PR: How to use social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

Sensei.com.au (2017). Retrieved 6 September 2017, from https://www.sensis.com.au/asset/PDFdirectory/Sensis_Social_Media_Report_2017-Chapter-1.pdf

Stay in touch with us on Social - CommBank. (2017). Commbank.com.au. Retrieved 6 September 2017, from https://www.commbank.com.au/personal/support/social-networks.html

Tuten, T. L., & Solomon, M. R. (2014). Social media marketing. London: Sage.