The Top 400 Banks on Twitter

The Financial Brand tracks 400 English-speaking retail banks on Twitter. This list represents nearly all such banks, with a handful of exceptions here and there.

What does the typical bank on Twitter look like? They have around 250 followers, and pump out a tweet about every week or so.

Aggregating the data reveals that fewer than one million people are following retail banks on Twitter, and banks only follow one quarter of those people back. Subtract the quarter million people following AmEx and and banks are only reaching a collective audience of 467,410 people. That barely equates to 0.15% of the entire US population. BofA alone has a customer base 110x that size. Subtract 16,500 followers from the 65 banks (16.3%) that haven’t tweeted in over one year. And many of a bank’s followers are industry peers — consultants, vendors, the trade media and other banks. Keep in mind, financial institutions have been on Twitter since at least 2008; we’re well into the banking industry’s third year on the social platform now.

Here’s the rest of the stats for the 400 retail banks on Twitter and how they all break down.

Followers

• Banks with less than 200 followers: 188 (47%)
• Banks with more than 1,000 followers: 40 (19.8%)
• Banks with more than 5,000 followers: 27 (6.8%)
• Number of people following banks on Twitter: 713,744
  (246,334 or 35% of which are attributed to AmEx, arguably not a retail bank)
• Average number of followers per bank: 1,784
• Mean number of followers: 222

Following

• Banks following no one: 43 (10.8%)
• Banks following 10 people or less: 102 (25.5%)
• Banks following fewer than 200 people: 275 (68.8%)
• Banks following 1,000 people or more: 40 (10%)
• Mean number of people followed: 64

Tweets

• Banks with 10 tweets or less: 53 (13.3%)
• Banks sending over 1,000 tweets total: 58 (14.5%)
• Total tweets sent by 400 English-speaking banks: 363,344
• Average number of tweets sent per bank: 908
• Mean number of tweets sent: 195

Frequency

• Banks who tweeted in the last 2 hours: 78 (19.5%)
• Banks who tweeted in the last 24 hours: 166 (41.5%)
• Banks who tweeted in the last week: 238 (59.5%)
• Banks who haven’t tweeted in a month or more: 121 (30.3%)
• Banks who haven’t tweeted in over a year: 65 (16.3%)
• Banks who have never sent a tweet: 15 (3.8%)