People spend, on average, roughly four hours a day on their phone and social media activity accounts for more than half of that time (two and a half hours), according to 2022 Hootsuite research.
That’s an opportunity to engage with consumers that banks and credit unions cannot forego. But some financial institutions are more effective in social media than others, and the Power 100 rankings are designed to highlight the best.
To assemble the rankings — called the P100 for short — The Financial Brand tracks the social media activity of banks and credit unions around the world, assessing a variety of metrics across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram every quarter.
Then, for every financial institution that appears on one or more of those lists, a P100 score is determined based on its activity across all four platforms and the aggregate size of its social media community.
See the social media standouts for the third quarter:
The Power 100 for Banks
The Power 100 for Credit UnionsMore detail, including the full methodology, can be found on the FAQ page for the rankings.
The latest P100 research, which is for the third quarter of 2022, shows:
- The average bank tweets 21 times more than the average credit union.
- Banks are gaining Facebook followers again after a few sluggish quarters.
- Eight credit unions have upped their social media activity enough to earn their way into the overall ranking (and knock out eight others).
One of those eight newcomers is among largest credit unions in the country, the $17 billion-asset Alliant Credit Union in Illinois. For many years, it hovered in the top 150, surprisingly not hitting the top 100 in social media engagement before, even though it has 700,000-plus members and a digital-only operating model.
Below are more stats and insights pulled from The Financial Brand’s third-quarter rankings for each social media platform. These are based on raw numbers for the banks and credit unions whose activity in the third quarter of 2022 placed them among the top 100 on a particular platform.
A Million Facebook Likes for the Top 100 Banks
- Top bank on Facebook: State Bank of India (17,772,880 likes)
- Top credit union on Facebook: Navy FCU (1,182,022 likes)
Cumulatively, the top 100 banks on Facebook snagged more than a million new likes on their posts — with those in the top 10 nabbing a quarter of them (226,695 likes).
The top 100 credit unions had 26,312 new Facebook likes in the third quarter as a group. Although that averages out to 263 likes per credit union, the likes were not nearly so equitably distributed as that. The credit unions that ranked in the top 10 on Facebook picked up, on average, three likes for every one like the other 90 credit unions received.
Size plays into this dynamic, as the credit unions in the top 10 hold $611 billion of assets collectively, an indication of the large number of members they serve and, thus, the comparatively larger pool of people who might be inclined to give their posts a thumbs up. There is a dramatic size difference between the largest and smallest credit unions.
Important to Note: In early 2022, Meta started tracking another metric: Facebook followers. The Financial Brand is tracking that data, but given how new it is, that stat isn’t factored into the rankings.
Banks Tweet Multiple Times a Day, Credit Unions Once
- Top bank on Twitter: State Bank of India (4,500,000 followers)
- Top credit union on Twitter: Nationwide Building Society (94,800 followers)
Banks are a lot more active on Twitter than credit unions, generally speaking.
The top 100 banks on Twitter collectively tweeted 176,226 times, while the top credit unions tweeted 9,645 times in all. For banks, that works out to roughly 1,762 new tweets per bank during the three-month period from July 1 to Sept. 31.
Tracking the Trends:
The top 100 banks on Twitter are tweeting an average of 587 times per month and 146 times per week.
The 92 credit unions on Twitter which were on the list from the third to the second quarter averaged 32 tweets a month, hardly more than one a day.
Such low velocity could be one factor in why credit unions continue to struggle to pick up new Twitter followers. In the third quarter, 27 of the top credit unions on Twitter lost followers. However, that is, at least, an improvement from the second quarter, when 37 credit unions lost followers.
Key Point: Among the financial institutions most active on Twitter, the average bank tweets roughly 21 more times a day than the average credit union.
Banks have comparatively robust followings.
For instance, one of the banks on the Twitter list averages double the new followers (it added roughly 9,600 in the third quarter) of all the credit unions combined (4,490 in the third quarter).
The top 10 banks on Twitter appear to be ramping up quickly, having gained just over a third (36%) of their followers in the last three months. They account for half of the followers that the overall banking group added in the third quarter.
Bank of Baroda — coming in at No. 13 in the Twitter ranking — also stood out for its stats. The Indian bank added nearly 200,000 Twitter followers, about 20 followers per each of its 10,100 tweets in the third quarter.
YouTube Growth Strong for Top Banks & Credit Unions
- Top bank on YouTube: State Bank of India (649,189,248 views)
- Top credit union on YouTube: MACU (16,984,550 views)
The top 100 banks and credit unions on YouTube picked up millions of views.
The total for the third-quarter bank list is 300 million views higher than the total for the second-quarter list, with 83% of those new views going to banks in the top 10.
The credit union list has 18 million additional views compared with the second quarter. As with the banks, the top 10 credit unions accumulated the majority of those views — 74%.
Sweeping Up the Views:
The top 10 credit unions garnered three-quarters of all new YouTube views among the top 100 credit unions.
Financial institutions are also attracting new YouTube subscribers, with this stat increasing in the third quarter by 243,500 for banks, to a total of nearly 4.2 million, and by 7,900 for credit unions, to 129,700.
Despite the wide gap in the numbers between banks and credit unions, the rate of subscriber growth for the quarter is similar percentagewise — 6.2% for the banks and 6.5% for the credit unions.
Instagram Is Still Any Banker’s Game
- Top bank on Instagram: State Bank of India (2,200,000 followers)
- Top credit union on Instagram: Navy FCU (84,400 followers)
Instagram is 12 years old this month, but it is still fairly new ground for financial institutions. The leaderboard can easily be rearranged at any point.
While the gap between the top banks on Facebook is in the tens of millions, only a little over two million followers separates the No. 1 slot from the No. 100 spot on the Instagram list. Similarly, only 84,000 followers distinguish the credit union on the top of that list from the one on the bottom.
Keep In Mind: As those numbers suggest, banks have significantly more traction on Instagram than credit unions do. The bottom 50 in the ranking of banks on Instagram have twice the number of followers as the entire credit union list (1,025,747 vs. 481,318 followers).
Some credit unions stood out, nonetheless.
Lake Michigan Credit Union, for example, grew its Instagram followers by 39.7%, to 18,700, in the third quarter of 2022. It did so while posting on the social media channel just 52 times, for an average of 1.75 posts per day.
Shifts in the Overall P100 Social Media Rankings
- Top bank in social media overall: State Bank of India
- Top credit union in social media overall: Navy FCU
Plenty has changed since the first time The Financial Brand calculated its first Power 100 ranking of the most active banks and credit unions in social media, based on their overall stats across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
Back then — in 2013 — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Capital One, ICICI and Citi held the top five spots on the P100 bank list.
Though ICICI, one of India’s largest banks, has stayed in the top 10 every quarter since, the four U.S. banking giants have tumbled, BofA most of all, to No. 30, Citi the least, to No. 11.
Capital One, for its part, is No. 23 in the ranking for the third quarter of 2022 and Wells Fargo is No. 15. ICICI is No. 3 for the quarter.
The Leaders Holding Their Spots: The top credit unions in social media have seen much less movement since 2013. Three of the top five back then — Navy Federal, Mountain America and Nationwide Building Society — have continued to battle it out for the gold, silver and bronze for almost a decade.
Desert Financial Credit Union and Tinker Credit Union have joined them in the top five, displacing the other two 2013 champs: America First and Golden 1.
In the most recent P100, none of the top five credit unions have budged from the spots they held in the second quarter.
Even so, eight credit unions are newcomers in the latest rankings: Besides Alliant, these are Eastman, Community America, Credit Union of America, Mission Credit Union, GTE Financial, People’s Choice and Landmark.
Also check out the previous Power 100 rankings: