CU Management Magazine

Credit Union Management™ Magazine

Tyco FCU’s Social Media Strategy March 2011 – Vol: 34 No. 3

by Jason Vitug

Facebook helps CU reach far-flung members

March 21, 2011

Tyco Federal Credit Union launched its social media strategy softly in November 2009 by setting up pages or groups on:

● Facebook,● Twitter,● LinkedIn,● Yelp,● Wikipedia,● Flickr,● YouTube.

Then in February 2010 we launched the social media strategy to our membership by incorporating Facebook and Twitter images on the footer of our website, our e-mail signatures and e-mail and print marketing. The results were great!

● On Facebook, we grew from 30 likes to 300 in 60 days and are now at 495 likes.● We’ve been able to reach potential members in locations where we have no

branch presence. For example, 98 members in Florida and the Midwest found us on Facebook and joined the credit union. When we launched our page, we had eligible members tell us “I ran straight to my manager and asked, ‘why haven’t I heard about our credit union?’” We also had a member join the CU because they saw our ad pop up while she was playing Frontierville on Facebook. She was not aware of Tyco FCU before.

● We currently average 3,500 post views from individuals who’ve liked our page. That means those who like Tyco FCU have seen our page 3,500 times in the past 30 days.

● Our first promotion on Facebook included an auto loan promo using Facebook ads targeted to our field of membership in various major cities. We got eight auto loans for literally pennies on the dollar compared to traditional print channels.

● We started customizing our page with Facebook Markup Language tabs to deliver

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marketing information on our Facebook page.● Facebook is the No. 4• top referrer to our website.

My social media background started in college. I was one of those early Facebook adopters when it still required having a college e-mail address. I recall being one of the first 10,000 users of Myspace also. And I knew social media could be very good for Tyco FCU. But I didn’t limit the strategy to Facebook or Twitter. I wanted to make sure it also impacted search engine results as part of my search engine optimization strategy. By simply adding additional sites that reference Tyco FCU we have been able to increase our online presence, improving the search results in Google. It is part of our SEO strategy to increase the number of third-party websites referencing our main website. After a full year, our Google organic results increased 155 percent and Yahoo, 48.96 percent. When you search for “Tyco Credit Union,” the results you see are our website, Twitter, Facebook, Wiki and Yelp results. On our Facebook page, we don’t see as much visual engagement as we’d like (i.e. comments, likes, posts, etc.) but we know individuals are viewing our page and clicking on links. For instance, I’ll write a blog and place the link on Facebook. That day we’ll see 80-85 click-throughs to our blog. • Measuring ROI There is much talk about measuring social media. What is the return on investment? You can look at it primarily as part of your brand management strategy. How much is your brand worth? We are looking for actual returns for our investment, so we end up having to do more manual tracking until there is a better way someone comes up to tracking conversions from Facebook. But if you wait until there is the perfect tool for measuring results, it might be too late. Don’t Sit on the Sidelines I’ve spoken with a number of financial institution leaders, not limited to CUs, who are still sitting on the sidelines about social networks, in particular Facebook. I caution them that they will lose the battle in controlling their brand if they feel it isn’t the time to devote resources. There are over 600 million people on Facebook and chances are their members or potential members are on there. Facebook is indexing websites for people to “like.” The company then loses control of their brand. CUs should control their brand and cultivate the communication about their brand. Tools, such as Seesmic Desktop are readily available and free to make managing your brand on social networks a bit easier.

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Internal Communication, Too When I started pushing social media as an inexpensive way to communicate with our members and increase brand awareness, I knew this was an effective internal communication tool as well. I first asked our employees about their thoughts and use of social media channels. From this, we began cultivating a social media organization. Our employee resources and tools were placed on wikis so anyone in the organization can improve processes. My CEO and I started internal blogs to communicate about the state of the industry and marketing campaigns. With our sponsor Tyco Electronics, we pioneered the use of Yammer, an internal Twitter-type collaboration tool and we had more conversations using instant messenger. Tyco FCU is not slowing on social media anytime soon. Our plans for the future include:

● more videos,● sweepstakes,● polls, and● quicklinks (In fact, we have already added an additional tab on Facebook with

frequently used links to our partner sites or content from our website.)

Jason A. Vitug, MBA, is VP/membership development at $110 million/7,000-member Tyco Federal Credit Union, Redwood City, Calif.

© 2011 - CUES

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