Money Watch – Personal Finance Blog

The Financial Brand have published a list of the top 400 English-speaking banks who have Twitter accounts.

A couple of weeks ago we started tracking the Twitter accounts of UK high street banks, with the focus on customer service accounts, rather than press office or “marketing” accounts where you’re more likely to get sold to rather than be able to get your customer service problems solved.

Whilst The Financial Brand lists hundreds of accounts, sometimes relating to different areas within a bank, only a handful relate to UK banks, with Halifax leading the way, closely followed by their brothers at Lloyds TSB, and with First Direct after that.

The Financial Brand also have some other interesting stats on the use of Twitter by these banks:

• Average number of followers per bank: 1,784
• Banks with less than 200 followers: 188 (47%)
• Average number of tweets sent per bank: 908
• Banks who have never sent a tweet: 15 (3.8%)
• Banks who haven’t tweeted in over a year: 65 (16.3%)

What does this tell us about the use of Twitter in banking?

I would conclude that it’s still an under-utilised medium and that UK banks should be doing more to engage and interact with their clients on Twitter. It’s clear from some of the statistics above that there’s still a lot of work to be done in this respect.

Whilst even the minorest(?) celebrity can get themselves tens of thousands of followers, big name banks are still struggling. Obviously, the banks won’t be tweeting about the minutiae of their fun filled lives, but nevertheless with the millions of customers some of these banks have, they should be generating a decent following and sharing useful information or gathering feedback from their clients.

Twitter is a great tool for getting over important and time critical messages (such as “we’re having problems with our internet banking login”), plus it can be a good place to start a customer service conversation (although the banks should make it clear that customers shouldn’t divulge any sensitive data on Twitter).