The Commercial Bank of Ceylon’s innovative and refreshing use of social media to engage with target audiences has won the Bank the prestigious accolade of ‘Social Media Brand of the Year 2018’ from the Asian Customer Engagement Forum (ACEF).
This special category award was presented to the Bank at ACEF’s 7th Global Customer Engagement Forum & Awards in Mumbai on 7th April. 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 prodigious 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 Mr 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.”
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 & Now Photo Challenge, “Week of Love” Valentine’s Day campaign, iPhone Red Giveaway and Dinner Voucher Giveaway to name a few.
Activations, campaigns and posts of this nature resulted in Commercial Bank’s Facebook page recording impressive statistics in 2017. This included 42 million plus impressions, 1.7 million video views, more than 1 million likes/reactions, and more than 300,000 page likes. The Bank recorded the highest level of engagement across Facebook pages of competitor banks, including those that had been on Facebook for longer and had more page likes.
The Bank’s Viber Public Account launched in February 2017 had 143,927 followers at the end of the year, the highest number of followers across the Viber Public Accounts of all banks in the country. The official YouTube channel of the Bank had recorded a watch time of 257,941 minutes as of 31st December 2017.
This is the second consecutive year that Commercial Bank has won an award from the ACEF. The Bank’s e-Passbook app received the Gold for ‘Most Admired Customer Engaged Mobile App’ at the 6th Asia Pacific Customer Engagement Awards in April 2017.
The only Sri Lankan bank to be ranked among the Top 1000 banks of the world for seven years consecutively, Commercial Bank operates a network of 261 branches and 757 ATMs in Sri Lanka. The Bank has won more than 30 international and local awards in 2016 and 2017 and has over the years received multiple awards as Sri Lanka’s Best Bank, Best Trade Bank, Strongest Bank and Most Respected Bank from a number of local and international institutions and publications.
Commercial Bank’s overseas operations encompass Bangladesh, where the Bank operates 19 outlets, Myanmar, where it has a Representative Office in Yangon, the Maldives, where the Bank has a fully-fledged Tier I Bank with a majority stake and Italy, where the Bank operates its own money transfer service.