4 Social Media Insights on Credit Cards

In the first quarter of 2017, five leading credit cards (Discover, VISA, MasterCard, Capital One, and American Express) were mentioned over 78,000 times on Twitter alone.

Many of today’s marketing thought leaders will tell you that the day when businesses owned their own brands is over. Social media, review sites, and the general accessibility of unbiased information has overcrowded brands’ marketing messaging.

Certainly, the sheer volume of conversation surrounding credit cards gives some credence to the idea.

Credit card companies should be aware of what’s being said about their brand and who’s saying it. The Brandwatch suite, Analytics, Audiences, and Vizia, can help your business do just that.

In this post, we’ll review four insights from spending just 10 minutes in an Analytics Dashboard and what they can reveal about five credit card brands.

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1) American Express and MasterCard drive the most Twitter engagement

This helps us understand the relative size of each brand, how big their influence is online. Many brands will use metrics like this, a form of Share of Voice metric, as an early look into their online competitive landscape.

2) Capital One gets Retweeted. VISA won’t reply to you.

Capital One was the most retweeted brand in the analysis. The most retweeted content? A tweet about their TV ad during March Madness. Notice that they have fewer followers but higher engagement than VISA? There’s something to be learned from Capital One’s campaigns. Meanwhile, VISA was one of the least active and least mentioned accounts – in particular, it seems that VISA isn’t directly engaging with their audience, missing out on one of the key advantages of Twitter.

3) Capital One Campaigns: #CreditResolution and #SXSW

A quick look at the Analytics topics cloud surrounding these five credit card companies reveals some of the strongest campaigns and trends. Again, Capital One comes out as a dominant brand – conversation around #CreditResolution and their Credit Wise tool stood out as one of the most mentioned topics. Beyond that, Capital One’s #CapitalOneHouse at SXSW was another dominant topic.

4) Discover: the future of credit cards?

A breakdown of the conversation directed at each credit card by author age reveals that while American Express draws in an older crowd, Discover’s audience leans toward those under 24. This seems like a smart long-term position – if they’re able to retain that younger cohort over time. Brands might use such analyses to determine what products and messaging will match their engaged online audience.

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Asking the Right Questions

In just a quick glance at an Analytics Dashboard, we’re able to get a feel for the competitive environment, social strategy, leading campaigns, and demographic makeup of credit companies’ online audiences.

Where Brandwatch Analytics excels is in answering and tracking key business questions, guiding business strategy with analysis that’s both quick and robust to the online world. That starts with asking the right question, then digging into the data to see how social can support it.

Have a question to ask? Find out how Brandwatch Analytics, Audiences, or Vizia can support it.