With the world’s fifth largest Facebook
community, Turkey presents a rich hub for its banks to reach
customers via social media.

And some of Turkey’s biggest banks can indeed
claim immense success in the social customer relationship
management (CRM) space:

Individual “likes” on the Facebook pages of
both, Garanti (the second largest privately-owned bank by assets)
and Akbank (the third largest privately-owned bank by assets) rose
by more than ten times in the past seven months.

When
RBI
ranked banks on Facebook
by the highest number of
likes in mid-January, the figure for Akbank was less then 49,000
individual “likes”.

Fast forward seven months – and the number has increased by more
than ten times to 508,270 “likes”, representing 6.3% of its
customer base.

 

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Some of the most active banks on Facebook
worldwide

Garanti has an even higher “likes” figure: The
number rose from 35,935 to 523,913 between mid-January and
mid-August. This equals 5.2% of its customer base.

And that figure is excluding Garanti
Bank’s Bonus Card Facebook page, which has accumulated 126,597
“likes” to date.


Turkish banks have fine-tuned their focus on social CRM
as a
tactic to reap profits from the lucrative unbanked and youth
sector, rolling out new services and products via alternative
delivery channels – and marketing them not just in the traditional
way, but also by seizing the social media potential for
promotions.

 

Social CRM far from reaching peak position

However, Isbank, the largest privately-owned lender by assets,
lags behind its smaller rivals with 89,378 “likes” as of 16 August,
while the country’s fourth largest private bank, Yapi Kredi, only
has 24 592, a figure that has shot up from a couple of hundred in
February.

Other
banks with a significant Facebook presence include Finansbank,
which has increased its fan number from less than 25,000 in
February to
158,092.

DenizBank, meanwhile, is on the path to
achieve a higher social media presence: The number of “likes” on
its Facebook page have shot up from less than 1,000 at the end of
June to almost 11,100.

Social CRM is a hot topic among Turkish banks,
with the majority of the banks eager to reach consumers via
Facebook and other social media platforms (although banks’ Twitter
accounts are still in their infancy states).

 

Turkey had the world’s fourth largest Facebook community in
April, but since then, the UK has pushed it back into fifth
place.

To read
in-depth interviews with Turkish banks
and find out more about
their social media initiatives and more, subscribe
to RBI
or click on the links below.

 

Interviews:


DenizBank: Big Aspirations


Garanti Payment Systems CEO on a cashless
Turkey


New generation of innovation at Ziraat

Akbank:
Innovation, innovation, innovation

Kuveyt
Turk: Gold rush

 

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