In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the FinTech companies that are thriving on social media. While there may not be a one-size-fits-all approach to social media marketing, a high engagement rate and active customer interactions are key indicators of a successful approach.

We’ve analyzed a number of FinTech social media accounts and selected the ones that stood out the most due to their unique approaches or high engagement rates.

We’ve identified some common trends, including a focus on exposure over engagement, a lack of creativity in some accounts, and the prevalence of giveaways and free products to incentivise engagement. We’ve highlighted three of our favourite FinTech social media accounts and looked at how they stand out in their industry.

1.   Square- Using Twitter as the Ultimate Customer-Centric Marketing Tool

Square is a payment processing company that enables businesses to accept payments via mobile devices. The company has an active presence on Twitter, with over 300K followers (at the time of writing) and is consistently posting. Their Twitter account is a mix of company news, user-generated content, thoughts of the day, and promotional posts. They also share a lot of content related to small business entrepreneurship and tips for running a successful business.

What makes Square’s social media stand out is its customer engagement. They are continuously asking their followers for specific calls to action that get them thinking, and most importantly… replying. Tweets such as “Reply with something that have you feeling accomplished?” and “Sound off with the piece of advice you always go back to” have customers engaging in their reply sections in the past month. These prompts are nothing to do with the business itself and are questions that someone may be asked by a friend. This makes their account much more personable and successfully encourages engagement.

Another call to action was a scavenger hunt that the brand advertised on Twitter. They encouraged people to find a business using Square and reply to their tweets with a photo of the device. Square promised to retweet any photos sent in, which is a small price to pay for free promotion. The Tweet received over 10,000 views and resulted in consumer participation, such as the one shown here.

As well as encouraging consumer participation, Square actively encourages business owners by sharing empowering thoughts such as “Working for yourself is one of the most powerful things you can do.” This further highlights how Square’s social media is a wholesome place to be, with clever marketing techniques that get users to indirectly create content for free.

2.   Starling – Using TikTok to Educate and Entertain

Starling Bank is a UK-based digital bank that offers a range of financial products and services to its customers, including current accounts, loans, and savings accounts. The company has a strong social media presence on various platforms, including TikTok.

Starling’s videos that tend to achieve amazing view counts (in the hundreds of thousands) are typically financial well-being videos where various people give the audience tips and tricks.

For example, Starling recently shared 5 quick tips to avoid getting scammed and frauded. At the time of writing, the video is sitting at just shy of 225K views and over 5K likes. Viewers seemed very grateful for the tips and even expressed their appreciation in the comments section.

Starling’s TikTok views seem quite varied and range from 300 to 1 million. One of their highest-performing videos, in terms of views, was a 5-second clip of someone simply sipping tea. The copy stated, “No we’re still good it’s just when we agreed to split the bill and you used your calculator instead of just using the Split The Bill feature…”. They hopped onto a trend that was very viral at the time and although it likely took a lot less time than some of their other, longer, videos, it performed very well!

Overall, Starling Bank’s success on TikTok shows the power of combining helpful financial advice with clever marketing techniques. They are able to educate and entertain their audience in the same space.

3.   Zopa- Month-long Instagram campaigns

Zopa is a UK-based peer-to-peer lending company that offers investors an average return of 3.2% if they invest in loans online. In addition to providing personal loans with lower-than-average interest rates, Zopa has found a way to make the typically complex and confusing world of peer-to-peer lending more approachable by utilizing creative and entertaining marketing campaigns on Instagram.

Zopa has taken its creativity to another level on Instagram by taking to the streets and engaging with the British public. Many reels can be found on their account of a member of the Zopa team asking strangers interesting questions. Recently, they focused on engagement and marriages by asking some of the below questions:

  • “Do you prefer Hen and Stag Dos in the UK or abroad?”
  • “Who should front the bill for Hen and Stag Dos?”
  • “What are the best and worst proposals you have heard of?”
  • “Would you prefer money or wedding gifts?”
  • “How much do you think an engagement ring should cost?”

This month-long campaign has not only featured the above reels, but tips and tricks around all things weddings and money. They began the campaign by partnering with @theyrequeer and his fiance as they shared their personal story.

Zopa’s monthly themed campaigns, like the recent marriage and money campaign, are a brilliant marketing technique that allows for creative content creation and audience engagement. By getting people to share their opinions and experiences, Zopa prompts others to share their own thoughts in the comments, leading to a more engaging and interactive social media presence. While some argue that this trivializes lending, Zopa’s customer-empowering strategy makes personal finance more approachable and less intimidating in the current environment.

Summing up FinTech Social Media…

In conclusion, the success of FinTech companies on social media can be attributed to their ability to engage with customers in creative and innovative ways. It is a relatively new sector and it can be described as an industry that essentially disrupted the traditional financial sector.

So, this allows for a certain freedom that other, longer-standing industries may not have the luxury of. The consistent theme is that FinTechs are doing something different, which is actually very on-brand.

What other FinTech companies have you seen making an impact on social media? We’d love to talk about them in a future blog post so please do let us know!

Tinisha Osu is a Marketing Executive with two degrees in Psychology. She is the first-author of a published psychology paper and is beginning her career in marketing through blog-writing, creating social media content and running marketing campaigns.