Money Watch – Personal Finance Blog

Independent research company DigitalMR has released its first annual UK Banking Social Media report, in which they analysed over 200,000 customer comments about high street banks between January and December 2011.

The full report covers:

•     Share of voice for all banks.
•     Monthly trend for top 10 banks.
•     Top 10 Topics by number of mentions.
•     The disruptive forces that social network users will have on banks.
•     Individual focus of the top 10 banks.
•     Social Media presence.
•     Recommendations on strategy for the use of Social Media Research.

UK banks can use the report to gauge customer perceptions of their performance against that of their competitors across a range of criteria for the whole of 2011.

DigitalMR Group Managing Director, Michalis Michael commented: “This report provides a national benchmark for how banking brands are perceived by customers online. Banks attracting criticism will be able to use the analysis to find out how they can improve their competitive position.”

Report Highlights

The top 5 UK banks that receive the highest share of online mentions:

1. HSBC (14.4%)
2. Lloyds TSB (13.5%)
3. Halifax (10%)
4. RBS (9.6%)
5. Santander UK (9%)

There is a large difference in the positive and negative mentions that some of the banks attract. HSBC (9.5%), Halifax (9.5%) and Lloyds TSB (7.8%) received the highest share of positive posts.

However both HSBC (12.1%) and Lloyds TSB (10.8%) received a relatively higher proportion of negative comments. Conversely Halifax accounted for only 6.2% of negative comments compared with a much larger proportion (9.5%) of positive ones.

The Top 5 most discussed topics between January and December were:

1. Loans
2. Credit Cards
3. Customer Care
4. Online Banking
5. Overdrafts

Loans attracted nearly 8,000 mentions on the internet. However, banks are likely to turn their attention to the topics that attracted a greater number of negative comments. The three most discussed topics with negative mentions were Customer Care, Loans and Bank Employees.

Net Sentiment Score

The difference in the number of positive to negative posts that each bank attracts, provides it with a Net Sentiment Score (NSS). NSS is an overall percentage score of net positive posts. Of the Top 10 banks measured during 2011, the three best performers in terms of achieving the highest NSS were:

1. ING Direct 57.5%
2. Halifax 43.3%
3. Clydesdale Bank 41.7%

The Royal Bank of Scotland was the only bank from the Top 10, which achieved a negative NSS with (-2.1%). The next lowest was Bank of Ireland with a NSS of 0.5%.

DigitalMR’s report (powered by SociaNuggets) analyses thousands of customer comments posted via a range of relevant finance related websites and open access social media platforms. It measures not only the number of comments posted by consumers on the internet, but also sentiment – whether these posts are positive or negative.

Results are based on comments posted by consumers on the major UK banks including: Lloyds TSB, HSBC, Halifax, NatWest, Bank of Ireland, Santander, Barclays, RBS, ING Direct, Clydesdale Bank, Saxo Bank, American Express, First Direct, Bank of Scotland, Abbey, Northern Rock, Northern Bank and Alliance and Leicester.