The absence of successful case studies from smaller institutions is by no means from a lack of effort. There are hundreds upon hundreds of community banks and credit unions that have sought social media gold, many who had strategies and were coached by consultants.

For now, it seems there are two kinds of case studies: big banks… and everyone else (with very few exceptions here and there).

Thanks for your comment. This study concentrated on finding empirical correlations, and addressed nothing of a qualitative nature. I can say, however, that the vast majority of banks do not send @replies. Usually the use of Twitter to address service issues is limited to the big banks, and for a number of reasons. First, and most importantly, consumers usually only refer to megabanks by brand name — all others are generically encapsulated with the catchall “bank.” As in, “I had to wait in line for 20 minutes at the bank today.” If it was a brand name bank, they might say, “I had to wait 20 minutes in line at BofA.” Megabanks are the only ones with major brand awareness to warrant mentioning by name.

In a previous study conducted by The Financial Brand, a financial institution would get one relevant social mention per $100 million in assets per month. If you’re BofA, you’ll see upwards of 15K-20K tweets per month. But if your Smallville Community Bank, you might not see more than 1 or 2.

It’s easy to dismiss the significance of follower counts, but from a marketing perspective one could argue the importance of “reach.” If you’re a $500 million bank and no one is talking about you and you only have 20 followers, can you really find much value in your Twitter activity even if your 20 followers are ardent supporters? But if this same $500 million financial institution could reach 2,000 people? Or 20,000? That certainly seems like something that would affect the bank’s view of Twitter’s value. And there would likely be more than 20 ardent fans among 20,000 followers.

The Financial Brand has previously written about the value and strategic implications of providing service through social channels, particularly Twitter. But again, social CRM was beyond the scope of this study. The purpose was to identify trends and correlations supported by quantitative analysis. If The Financial Brand had the resources, we would also field qualitative studies, but unfortunately that isn’t the case.

It is obvious to me that the bigger banks are going to have the resources and the customers to have bigger followings. They’ve probably hired someone to create a strategy for them and tweet more consistently because, well, they have money…and customers.

I am more interested in which metrics are affecting brand loyalty and the bottom line. For instance, how many customer service requests were fulfilled on these channels? How much was moved from the branches or the call center? And how many customers followed links tweeted that go them to the bank’s website to make an inquiry or sale?

Of the followers added, which resulted in bigger rewards for the bank? Which followers added have become a vocal advocate of the brand?

To me, follower count means almost nothing. It’s if you have the right followers that makes all the difference in the world.

Another thing, tweet frequency means only so much. Of course, you want your bank to be consistently providing relevant information that follows a strategy, but if your customers have a saturation point of 6 tweets per week, then why try to send out 50?

I just want to caution readers that are looking at this that these numbers must be taken with a grain of salt and with regard to the individual financial institutions.

But I suspect the lack of success in twitter is also due poor “tweet” quality. What I mean by that is that banks are not saying something that people find interesting.

Banks cannot benefit from the charm or popularity of real people, but they could be tailoring their tweets for a sector of the population (impossible to please everyone and they need to accept that). Directing tweets to those people and “touching” them will bring more followers.

I think what this amazingly in depth research illustrates is the impact of an unstructured or nonexistent social media strategy. Hopefully, most of the banks in your study will go back to the drawing board, set goals for their social media efforts, build metrics to measure impact, and determine if a Twitter strategy makes sense.

As with most marketing strategies, just because it is cheap to use a channel doesn’t mean it makes sense to use a channel.