Twitter is your credit union marketing wingman
Hello ladies, have you met my friend Twitter?
Twitter is the perfect marketing wingman. He will tell everyone around you about the things that make you great. He will even go out and bring cool people to you. He is awesome like that. But not only is he a great wingman, Twitter makes a pretty good partner.
He likes to talk for hours and hours about all the things that you are interested in and listens when you want to talk about yourself. He wants you to tell him about your day. He is always there when you need him. He always wants to chat online – when you are ready to chat. He wants you to text him all day long and tell him about the minutia of your day.
Jokes aside (for now), I have fallen back into Twitter. At first I didn’t care for it so much, it was kind of pointless and slightly dumb. I mean, why would someone care if I were at Target buying rash cream for my daughter? Plus I didn’t know anyone on Twitter that I wanted to hear from while they were shopping for rash cream.
Then something funny happened. The other CU people that blog or leave comments here were talking about being on Twitter.
Not being one to miss out on a party, I showed up. It was a whole new experience. There were three or four conversations going on. As my buddy list grew and more people got involved in the CU Twitterverse it became a tool. We would discuss immediate and current happenings. It created a filter for the bloggers to noodle out ideas before committing them to the interwebs. It became a sounding board where we have discussed outdoor credit union concerts, social media, branding, books and news.
Some of us have promoted current or interesting blog posts, web links or each other when there is an accomplishment that is noteworthy (like the Currency Marketing and Commonwealth CU hat-trick at CUES this year).
Twitter has become party central with all the people you like to hang out with. Because of this, Twitter has been experiencing some growing pains.
With the adoption of various third party twitter scanners that run as Instant Messenger like applications and the influx of users – twitter use has exploded. This growth has caused a few glitches – but overall, it is a regular part of my daily communications with the “outside world”. And if I am in conference with a client or “Twitter Silent” for a day, I can log in and look at the whole day’s conversation to catch up.
Why is this important to credit unions?
Well, for one, look at Washington Mutual. After they launched the WhooHoo campaign, a snarky individual set up a WhooHoo twitter account, which has satirized WaMu’s new marketing strategy. He has been leaving posts like
“WaMu. We don’t nickle and dime you, we overdraft you. Whoo-hoo!!!”
That’s funny, well it made me laugh. But what if someone started doing it to you? But for every guy like the WaMu guy, there are some legitimate folks have started tweeting (the verb form of “Twittering”)
As of today British Airways has started twittering (thanks Brad Garland) along with JetBlue tweeting about fare deals.
Wesabe has been tweeting, UTFCU and AllianceCU has been tweeting and even Comcast has been monitoring and responding to tweets regarding their services and practices. Lots of news stations and other information providers are jumping in too.
If this trend continues – then your members will be tweeting soon (they already are). With the adoption of mobile tweeting applications and the ease of having tweets sent to your cell phone as SMS/Text messages – it seems to fit right into the current pop culture trends.
But as one of my “Twitter Friends” poses the question “What if your board members could twitter with your CU members?” Talk about organizational transparency and serving the needs of your members!
So how do I catch the Twitters?
Tweet Scan - is a live search engine for Twitter. It searches all public messages on Twitter. You can search by keyword, author, and date with results available via email, RSS, and Twhirl.
You can use this to monitor who is tweeting about your credit union.
Summize - While other tools for searching Twitter have been around a while, they’re often not stable or consistent. Summize is FAST and shows trending topics plus different language searches.
There are also some nifty search operators like the one that helps you look for Tweets where people say “Credit Union” but only Tweets that include links. Of course, there is an RSS feed for any search results page as well.
TweetWheel - You may have a 100 or even 1000 followers. Which of your followers know each other? See how connected your members are. Build your own network. Tweet Wheel helps you find out visually. Note, if you have a LOT of followers, this will take a while.
Who Should I Follow? – When you first jump onto Twitter, it is hard to get the ball rolling. You can “Follow” me and I will introduce you to a bunch of other cool folks or you can use the tool, whoshouldifollow.com. It looks at who’s following you that you’re not following back and has sliders for filtering by popularity and physical location.
One thing you could do here is find out really popular Twitterers in your local area that your competition is NOT following and follow them. This may provide an opportunity to connect with their sphere of influence while they’re not looking.
Twerpscan - Now that you’ve beefed up your list of people to follow, who shouldn’t be following you? If there are opportunistic marketers following everyone under the sun in the hopes those good souls will just automatically follow them back, this tool might help identify those whom you may want to block.
The thing about this tool is that you have to login, so you may want to change your password to something temporary before running the tool and then change it back when you’re done. Twerpscan checks the number of followers of everyone on your contact list, the number of people they are following, and the ratio between them offering each follower’s name, bio, last tweet, a reputation thumbs up or down, followers, following and a link to block the follower if the ratio is over the threshold you set.
TwitterLocal - Is a neat tool for finding people who are tweeting in your area. It is on ly as accurate as the profile the tweeter creates so don’t get discouraged if there is no one in your area. Maybe they didn’t put in the city you are at and instead filled out their profile saying that they live “In Hell”
Twubble – You now have a few friends and want to know who they know or if you already have some folks in common. Twubble is a cool way to build your network quickly.
But that’s not all. You can go here for an excellent list of other twitter tools or here for a huge list of Twitter goodies or simply Google Twitter Tools and have at it.
Now for the flying leg drop!
This is the “finishing move” as to why you should seriously look at Twitter as part of your online marketing strategy.
Because it is 100% word of mouth and an edification based consumer awareness platform.
Here is a sample of what has been going on on Twitter that you don’t know about. These are actual quotes from people tweeting about credit unions.
Employees Tweeting? You know it!
Members Tweeting? Uh huh!
“ look for a credit union — way better than banks. I’m a member of Patelco.”
Non-Members Tweeting? Of Course!
“I’m thinking the FAA Credit Union or Bank of America. Thoughts?”
Why is everybody always Tweeting on me?
So there you have it. People are using this system as a first person communication tool. You can get involved with the people in your community. You can get involved with the trendsetters in your FOM. You can get actual, real Word of Mouth exposure with Twitter. You can respond to people in real time that are in line at your credit union complaining about the long lines. You can actually serve your members better.
And the best part – it is free. It just takes a little time and effort on your part to get the ball rolling.
You never know, that wingman could introduce you to the partner of your dreams.
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Comments
Whoa! Awesome post and you read my mind again…last week I was brainstorming for a post topic and thought, “Why haven’t I been blogging much lately? Oh, because I’m on twitter all the time! There’s a post.” And then you go and do a better and detailed job than I could on what twitter is all about.
That’s cool. Tony Mannor is my wingman.
Thanks Chris! It is good to know that people are actually reading this stuff.
It is funny to see a post get a ton of hits and no comments. It can make a guy feel a little long in the face.
Glad you liked it. From what I can tell from the analytics, other people are interested in the topic too 
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