HSBC is providing the best overall customer service and engagement on social media. That’s according to research commissioned by IMGROUP which examines the social footprint of the top 10 UK banks across four key channels. HSBC is the best performing bank on both Twitter and Facebook, the channels most used by the banks. Barclays and RBS are the next highest scoring banks overall. The research examines relevant metrics, such as number of followers, number of questions, response rate and response time to determine which bank is providing the best customer service and engagement across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Twitter is the preferred social media channel for UK banks with all 10 banks having a presence on here. Banks use Twitter, to varying extent, as a way of engaging with their customers or for customer service issues and complaint handling. Eight out of ten banks have an above average response rate compared to the worldwide financial industry average response rate of 42 per cent. HSBC has an impressive average response time of only 30 minutes on Twitter, compared to the worldwide financial industry average of six hours and 30 minutes. As a result HSBC is the most engaging and customer serviced focused bank on Twitter, followed by RBS, Lloyds and Barclays.

The second most popular social media channel among the banks is Facebook. All banks have a Facebook presence which they use for customer service issues and customer engagement, except for The Co-Operative and Tesco. The worldwide financial industry average response time is 9 hours 58 minutes on Facebook, whilst the average response rate is 78 per cent. Barclays UK is the bank with the highest number of likes (294,013) and conversations (17,956), which indicates that Barclays has a good following base and a good level of engagement online. However, HSBC had the fastest response time at 1 hour 26 minutes and a 100 per cent response rate, making it the best performing of the banks on Facebook.

While Facebook and Twitter are the preferred channels for online customer service, LinkedIn is mainly used for recruitment or information, but many pages are dormant. Only Bank of Scotland and Nationwide use their LinkedIn page to provide customer service, engage and respond to queries. Similarly, only few banks have a relevant Google+ presence, including Barclays, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Nationwide. However, no bank is currently publically engaging in customer service or responding to queries on Google Plus.

John Brookmyre, head of capital markets at IMGROUP, says: “With two thirds of the UK population now on Facebook and almost one third on Twitter, social media is an obvious platform for companies to engage with their customers and gain valuable insights from a customer’s social data. Financial organisations can use this data to build its knowledge of individuals and allow them to interact with their customers in a much more seamless, targeted and engaging way. This social intelligence enables organisations and brands to remain a few steps ahead of their customers and gain competitive advantage.”

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