Singapore, 16 March 2015 – In four years, OCBC Bank has established itself as the leading local bank in the social media space by leveraging social media platforms - Facebook (facebook.com/ocbcbank), Twitter (twitter.com/ocbcbank) and HardwareZone Forums - to engage existing and potential customers.

OCBC Bank has more than 578,000 fans on Facebook, 9,900 followers on Twitter and 21,000 followers on LinkedIn (figures as of 15 Mar 2015).

OCBC Bank’s social media strategy serves these purposes:

• Customer Engagement - Communicating important and useful information to customers
• Customer Service - Assisting customers in resolving issues and responding to their queries
• Branding - Building the OCBC Bank brand through interesting content and quality customer service
• Banking – Using social media in its product offerings.

OCBC Bank has developed the largest Twitter following amongst local banks with more than 9,900 followers, since the account was created in 17 June 2011. Its Facebook page was started on 12 September 2012.

Today, OCBC Bank is the only financial institution with a presence in HardwareZone, one of Singapore’s most active discussion forums. The Bank engages its customers directly regarding their banking issues and queries, and those who have questions about the Bank’s products or services.

In February this year, OCBC Bank started investing in its presence on LinkedIn, the corporate social networking platform, to reach out and engage professionals who are interested in pursuing a career with the Bank.

According to Socialbakers, OCBC Bank’s corporate Facebook page grew by 40% in 2014 alone, with interaction peaking in August during the promotion of the Juventus vs Singapore football match. In two years, the OCBC Bank Facebook page has amassed more than half a million fans, making it the largest Facebook page of any local bank.

Customer Engagement

Beyond being just a servicing platform, OCBC Bank uses social media to build strong and enduring relationships with its customers. The content strategy for its corporate Facebook page requires that posts be genuinely useful, entertaining or both. For posts that promote products, there is a conscious effort to make sure they are impactful and easy to understand. This has resulted in the Bank’s content being the most shared on Facebook (more than 6,000 shares) in 2014, ahead of the other local banks. The growth and engagement on the page resulted in a nomination for OCBC Bank in the Facebook Studio Awards in 2014.

Customer Service

With the benefit of Facebook, Twitter and HardwareZone Forums, customers can provide feedback anytime, anywhere, with the Bank’s responses posted within a work day. OCBC Bank has achieved an average response rate of 75.33% on Facebook in 2014, peaking at 83.33% in August, according to statistics provided by Socialbakers.

Beyond Facebook, customers who have used Twitter to complain when they encounter issues are pleasantly surprised when they get a response and an offer to help. Ms Vicki Lew, co-owner of a design agency, had trouble logging into Velocity@ocbc, OCBC Bank’s business banking online platform. She tried calling the support hotline, but hung up after being placed on hold. Her subsequent tweet to express her dissatisfaction about the issue received a response within an hour.

Said Ms Lew: "It was pretty impressive and convenient! I was just venting and totally not expecting to get any assistance because my general impression was that banks aren’t active on social media. Now if I have a problem, I’ll go to Twitter or Facebook because OCBC Bank staff are very responsive."

Branding

All of OCBC Bank’s social media content has been carefully designed to communicate, educate and entertain through a mix of curated and original posts. Whether it is communicating information about OCBC Bank’s new products, or inspiring stories and quotes, all posts are screened to ensure that they are content that consumers would genuinely be interested in receiving. This mindset helps the Bank to remove the marketing "fluff" and focus on what the customer truly values. Hence, the visuals and messages are always crafted to be vibrant, succinct, easy to understand, and witty too where appropriate. The success is measured by the engagement of the content through liking, commenting and re-sharing.

People talk about our ads: Even our Facebook advertisements have impressed, with bloggers like Xavier Lur tweeting about them.

Content that connects: To thank customers for their continued support, a special ATM was set up at our Chulia Street branch that featured branch manager, Clement Tee sitting inside it. The highlights video has received over 60,000 views on Youtube and more than 170,000 views on Facebook with 6,000 likes, comments and shares.

Banking

The "Pay Anyone" feature allows customers to send money conveniently to their Facebook contacts without the traditional need to provide bank account details. This feature only requires that the customer be a Facebook friend of the person the customer wants to send the money to. This removes the inconvenience of customers having to know their contacts’ bank account details. Alternatively, the customer can simply transfer cash using the recipient’s email address or mobile phone number.

Said Ms Koh Ching Ching, Head of Group Corporate Communications, OCBC Bank: "Social media’s pervasiveness forced us to think about how we have to evolve. We did not want to be on Facebook or Twitter or any other social media platform just because it was the trendy thing to do. We do it because it would add value to the customer’s experience and build strong customer relationships. We put in considerable time and effort to develop a strategy that would make social media platforms useful to our customers, and then execute it systematically. Today, our customers experience the OCBC brand on a spectrum of social media channels, in terms of helping them resolve their banking issues and understand banking, while also learning about our great deals."

Commenting on OCBC Bank’s success on social media, Deborah Gouineau, Public Relations Manager at Socialbakers – a social media analytics platform that allows brands to measure the success of their social media campaigns against their competitors – said: "OCBC Bank has shown great dedication in providing timely responses to their fans and followers on social media. It has demonstrated superior customer service by addressing the majority of social media enquiries within an hour. Because of this level of commitment, they have achieved Socialbakers’ Socially Devoted award."

Summary:

• The Bank’s Social Media channels allow for customers to provide feedback 24/7
• Our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ocbcbank) is the largest among local banks, amassing more than half a million fans in two years; 40% growth in 2014 alone.
• Fun yet functional content strategy help customers relate to us, resulting in our becoming the most relevant and engaged bank on Facebook; our content has the greatest number of shares by users, ahead of other local bank pages
• There are more posts by fans on our page than on any other local bank page
• OCBC Bank’s page nominated was for Facebook Studio Awards in 2013 – 2014
• @ocbcbank on Twitter has more than 9,900 followers - the largest following of all local banks