The social media benchmarks for Q2 2022 will be published Friday, July 15.
In the marketing world, social media has become a powerful metric — specifically to understand what consumers want and need from the brands they buy from and interact with. And every industry nationwide has jumped on the bandwagon.
Now, more dollars from the marketing budget are spent on social media (at 11.3% — second only to digital advertising at 13.5%) than even a website (10.4%), SEO (9.9%) and mobile marketing (9.8%), according to a Gartner Annual CMO Spend Survey.
Here are the top insights pulled from The Financial Brand‘s Social Media Rankings for Banks and Credit Unions for the first quarter of 2022:
- The top banks and credit unions are flopping on Facebook,
- Top banks on Twitter are showing healthy growth, while credit unions on Twitter fail to break 100,000 followers,
- Videos from the top banks on YouTube were viewed 1.6 billion times in 12 months and top credit unions see YouTube growth spurts,
- And traction on Instagram remains elusive for the top banks while credit unions struggle to earn the number of followers banks do.
See All Social Media Benchmarks
Top Banks See Net Negative Growth on Facebook
The top 100 banks on Facebook now collectively have over 140 million likes/followers on Facebook. Among these banks, 39 of them have over 1 million likes/followers. The median is 718,000 likes/followers, and it now takes a minimum of 142,000 likes/followers to crack the top 100 banks on Facebook.
Key Fact: The top 100 banks on Facebook now have 2,879,718 fewer followers than they had at the end of the first quarter in 2021.
The cause of this drop is likely Facebook taking action to purge fake accounts (think: spambots and “Russian trolls”).
Among the top 100 banks, they collectively added a combined 993,735 new likes/followers in the first quarter of 2022, an average growth rate of 0.71%. By comparison, the growth rate among these banks averaged 0.62% in the same period a year prior.
A typical bank in the top 100 on Facebook added an average of 10,000 new likes/followers over the first three months of 2022. Four banks added over 100,000 new likes/followers in this same period.
Key Fact: Over one-third of the top 100 banks on Facebook actually shed likes/followers during the first quarter of 2022.
The United States is the country most represented, with 18 banks in the top 100 on Facebook. Nigeria is next with 14, followed by India (9), the United Kingdom (8), South Africa (7), Kenya (6) and Canada (6).
Among the top 10 banks on Facebook, four hail from India, three from Nigeria, two from the United States (including Capital One and Chase Bank) and one from the Philippines.
Top Banks on Twitter Seeing Healthy Growth
More than half of the top 100 banks on Twitter have over 100,000 followers. Collectively, they now have 27.5 million followers. It now takes over 22,000 followers on Twitter for a bank to qualify for the top 100.
During the first quarter of 2022, the top 100 banks on Twitter added over 700,000 new followers — more than double the 326,500 that they added in the same period a year prior. The growth rate in Q1 improved from 1.27% in 2021 to 2.54% in 2022.
Key Fact: The top 100 banks on Twitter have 1.8 million more followers than they had at the end of Q1 2021, reflecting a 7.1% annual growth rate.
The top 100 banks on Twitter have collectively sent nearly 8 million tweets — 418,933 new tweets in the first quarter of 2022 alone. Among these banks, they average 3.5 followers for every tweet they’ve posted.
Key Fact: Banks have an average of five times the number of followers on Facebook than they have on Twitter.
Videos from the Top Banks on YouTube Viewed 1.6 Billion Times in 12 Months
Collectively, the top 100 banks on YouTube have garnered a whopping 5.8 billion all-time video views, with over 335 million of those coming within the first 90 days of 2022 — a quarterly growth rate of 5.8%.
Key Fact: In the one-year period between Q1 2021 and Q1 2022, the top 100 banks on YouTube generated over 1.6 billion new video views, an annual growth rate of 36.9%.
Among the top 100 banks on YouTube, 16 now have over 100 million all-time video views. The top bank, the State Bank of India, has well over half a billion YouTube views. However, if a bank has a more modest 2.6 million all-time video views, they can qualify for inclusion in The Financial Brand’s database listing the top 100 banks on YouTube.
As of March 31, 2022, more than 3.7 million people were subscribed to the top 100 banks on YouTube — 610,666 more than a year prior (an annual growth rate of 19.7%).
Traction on Instagram Remains Elusive Even for the Most Active Banks
At the end of Q1 2022, the top 100 banks on Instagram had a combined 11.5 million followers on Instagram, adding 408,213 of those in the first three months of the year. These banks have 1.6 million more followers than they had a year prior, reflecting an annual growth rate of 16.5%.
It takes only 10,300 followers to crack into the top 100 banks on Instagram. Just 26 banks have more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, while the median is 45,150 followers.
Among the top 100, the average number of Instagram posts published is around 1,000. Interestingly, a bank averages 61 Instagram followers for every post it publishes on Instagram. This 61:1 ratio of followers-to-posts on Instagram vastly overshadows the 3.5:1 ratio seen on Twitter (translation: banks get more followers from Instagram posts than tweets… but they also tweet a heck of a lot more often).
Key Fact: Banks have an average of 12 times as many Facebook followers as they have on Instagram, and about twice as many Twitter followers.
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Credit Unions Also Struggle with Facebook Growth
While more than a third of the top 100 credit unions (39%) have over a million likes on Facebook, there is only one credit union in the top 100 with over a million likes. Navy Federal Credit Union — with $153.5 billion in assets — added 1,830 likes in the first quarter of 2021 to bring its total likes to 1.18 million likes. This compares to the average for the top 100 credit unions at just over 49,000.
Key Fact: The top 100 credit unions on Facebook have garnered almost five million likes as a group.
Likewise, the median number of Facebook likes is 25,381, although the credit unions at the bottom of the top 100 list barely snagged 16,000 likes. Only the top five credit unions garnered over 100,000 likes and they are headquartered in Virginia (2), Utah (2) and Florida.
Key Fact: The top 100 credit unions on Facebook added an average of 228 likes in the first quarter of 2022.
Credit unions struggle to garner the Facebook likes banks do. The top 100 banks on Facebook added 993,735 new likes in Q1 2022, which is five times the total number of likes the top 100 credit unions have on Facebook.
Top Credit Unions on Twitter Don’t Break 100,000 Followers
The top 100 credit unions on Twitter have just over 701,000 likes in total, which the top 100 banks nearly earned in the first quarter of 2022 alone (700,300). The top 10 credit unions boast nearly half (49%) of all the followers of the top 100 credit unions with 344,100 Twitter followers.
The Twitter threshold to make the top 100 list of credit unions on Twitter is pretty low, however, at just 2,171. For comparison, the average Twitter user claims about 707 followers.
Credit unions overall had to send eight new tweets to gain a new follower in the first quarter of 2021. Of all time, the top 10 credit unions have tweeted nearly half (48%) of all the tweets the top 100 credit unions have, which comes out to just over a million and a quarter. On the other hand, the top 100 banks have sent out nearly 8 million Tweets for all time.
Key Fact: The top 100 credit unions have four times the number of likes on Facebook than they do followers on Twitter.
YouTube Growth Sprouts for Social Media-Savvy Credit Unions
The top 100 credit unions on YouTube snagged 33,451,641 new YouTube views in the first quarter of 2022, which is 10% of their aggregate views of all time (324,705,599). The average credit union added 334,516 new views and median for new views sat at 38,359.
The top 10 credit unions posted 2,141 new videos cumulatively, and averaged 45,062 views for every video. Additionally, for every video posted, the top 10 credit unions attracted 33 new channel subscribers.
Key Fact: Between the first quarter of 2021 and 2022, the top 100 credit unions generated 75 million new video videos, an annual growth rate of 30.4%.
In the first 90 days of 2022, only 11 credit unions generated more than one million new views in comparison whereas 40 of the top 100 banks picked up over a million and the Bank of Baroda with the newest views topped out at 64 million new views.
Credit Unions Need To Work Harder Than Banks for Followers
The top 100 credit unions on Instagram have nearly 500,000 followers on Instagram and the top 10 credit union comprise nearly half of those with 234,681 followers. The top 100 have an average of 4,945 followers and the median is 2,488.
In order for a credit union to make the top 100 on Instagram, they must hit the 1,514 threshold, which is up from 1,345 in the first quarter of 2021.
Key Fact: The top banks worldwide continue to drown out credit unions on Instagram, as their total Instagram followers total 11.5 million, which is nearly 23 times as large as the total number of the top 100 credit union Instagram followers.
The top 100 credit unions average 6 followers for every Instagram post. The top 100 credit unions nabbed an average of 253 new followers in the first 90 days of 2022, although the median number of new followers sat at 48.
All credit unions The Financial Brand tracks in its social media database averaged a 6:1 ratio for followers to accounts followed, meaning credit unions have to establish a balance of who they follow to maintain their own following. For comparison, banks have to follow far less Instagram users to pick up followers as they average 273 followers for every account followed.