A clever marketing campaign can turn around the tone of conversation for a brand on social media. This was revealed in DataEQ’s newly released South African Banking Sentiment Index, which analysed over 2.7 million consumer social media posts directed at the country’s major banks between 1 September 2020 and 31 August 2021.
Most notedly, Absa came out on top of the public Net Sentiment rankings due to the success of the #WeDoMoreWednesdays campaign, while FNB was able to mitigate the Net Sentiment damage caused by #RacistBanksMustFall through the #LoveFNB campaign.
“If it weren’t for their #WeDoMoreWednesdays campaign, Absa would have actually come sixth, rather than first in the index. This is a shining example of just how powerful a good social media campaign can be,” comments Lyndsey Duff, DataEQ’s Business Development Director.
Both Absa and FNB successfully leveraged social media campaigns that incentivised consumers to give positive feedback or promote products in order to be entered into competitions. “What was particularly interesting about these campaigns,” notes Duff, “is that they created mentions on social media that appear to be organic recommendations from impartial consumers.”
For example, a post requiring customers to answer the question, “How much life cover can one get on digital platforms?” attracted mentions from consumers saying things like, “You can get R4 million life cover via the app!”. This strategy allowed brands to target positive sentiment towards particular products by using ordinary consumers like brand ambassadors.
Another bank that proved innovative in terms of social media marketing was TymeBank. By leveraging influential brand ambassadors on social media, TymeBank was able to successfully drive positive content, which played a major role in achieving the top reputational sentiment score in the index. “In fact, 82% of TymeBank’s total reputational conversation consisted of posts or engagement with one of twenty brand ambassadors,” notes Duff.
Holding TymeBank back in terms of overall public sentiment, however, was their social media servicing abilities, or lack thereof. The index found that TymeBank was the least responsive bank, offering only 28% of priority tweets a response. “As a digital-first bank, this should be an area that TymeBank is owning if they want to uphold their high reputational sentiment score,” Duff concludes.