The Commercial Bank of Ceylon’s innovative use of social media to engage with target audiences has won the Bank the ‘Social Media Brand of the Year 2018’ award from the Asian Customer Engagement Forum (ACEF).
This special category award was presented to the Bank at ACEF’s seventh Global Customer Engagement Forum and Awards in Mumbai on April 7. More than 620 entries were received from around the world for the different categories of awards, but Commercial Bank submitted just one and won its category.
The award recognises Commercial Bank’s success in engaging with potential and existing customers with a largely non-commercial approach on five social media and messaging platforms – Facebook, Viber, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.
“We are delighted to win this award because it illustrates our ability to effectively adapt to changing trends,” Commercial Bank Managing Director Jegan Durairatnam said.
“Banks used to be viewed as conservative and traditional, but the phenomenon of social media has made it imperative that we learn very quickly how to use such media to reach out to next generation customers in particular,” he said.
Jettisoning the messaging approach it adopts with traditional media, Commercial Bank has carved a unique niche within the social media space to reach relatively younger audiences with inspirational concepts. Instead of promoting its products and services via Facebook in particular, the Bank provided an opportunity for fans to interact with it by two-way communication, providing relevant, useful and motivational information that would make a difference in their lives.
According to the Bank, this resulted in Commercial Bank’s Facebook Page achieving the highest organic engagement ratios for a Bank in Sri Lanka.
Some of the colourful activations that grabbed attention on Facebook were Commercial Bank’s Big Match Anthem, Big Match Poll, Miss Universe Message Contest, Great Ladies Video, Countdown to Auspicious Times, Origin of Rituals, Waste Recycle campaign, Let’s Build a Beautiful Sri Lanka campaign, Amazing Sri Lanka, Then and Now Photo Challenge, “Week of Love” Valentine’s Day campaign, iPhone Red Giveaway and Dinner Voucher Giveaway.
Activations, campaigns and posts of this nature resulted in Commercial Bank’s Facebook page recording impressive statistics in 2017.