BALTIMORE-Considering taking a deeper dive in social media? Take a look at your website first, says one analyst.
"There are so many credit union websites that are awful, and participating in social media won't generate new members," said Nichole Kelly, CEO at Social Media Explorer. "Fix the website first, because a bad website won't get you new members."
Kelly suggested that if credit unions hope to use social media to generate new memberships, they need to first look at the path to conversion and how non-members join the credit union.
"If I go to your website and there's no way for me to open a new account or find out enough information to make a decision on whether or not I want to use your credit union, it's always going to fall apart at the website."
Regardless of the size of the institution, she said, credit unions need to be making changes to adapt to consumer behaviors, while also making investments now to ensure the website can easily be viewed on a mobile device. "You have to make that investment now or you're going to get left behind."
The good news, she said, is that those website redesigns don't have to be prohibitively expensive.
"It could be as simple as migrating the front-end, consumer-facing part of the website and converting that to a Wordpress platform," she said. Kelly also recommended that CU's adopt a responsive platform for their website, so that the screen layout automatically realigns for whatever device it is being viewed on, whether that's a tablet, PC or smartphone.
