MasterCard Gearing Up For Social Media Push This Summer

Card brands are making more concerted efforts to move from just having a presence on social-media networks to actually engaging customer behavior. And MasterCard Worldwide is next up.

MasterCard, which says it has had a global social-media presence for about a year on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, says it is preparing to do social-media marketing, with undisclosed plans that could roll out perhaps by July.

“We really are just at the beginning [of using social media in marketing], and we’re defining what we’re going to do–from being a presence to having a more-robust consumer-engagement model,” Elizabeth Birenbaum, MasterCard vice president global digital marketing, tells PaymentsSource. “To get a digital-branded connection is the heart of our mission with social media.”

The goal is to drive preferences for MasterCard products and services and then drive use of the brand’s cards, she says.

MasterCard uses its Facebook page to promote its products and services, including an applications tab to MasterCard services such as Priceless Picks, which provides recommendations on restaurants, retailers and travel locations. The company’s posts also promote contests, such as giving away tickets to Vancouver cardholders to see the Vancouver Canucks National Hockey League team and an Audi TT Coupe car to Sovereign Bank debit cardholders.

MasterCard uses social media to create a dialog with consumers who follow them, Dierenbaum says. For example, when MasterCard revamped its World Elite MasterCard (see story),  it used Facebook and Twitter connections to disseminate information about the perks of the card, much the same way consumers share information with each other through those channels.

But there are nuances with each medium, Birenbaum explains. MasterCard posted three to five Facebook posts over several days, while “tweeting” three to five times per day, she says.

“We have to make sure we have the proper cadence and sequence on Facebook so we don’t bang consumers over the head if MasterCard posts keep showing up in their news feed,” Birenbaum says, noting that it is more appropriate to post more often via Twitter because it is “more fluid and frenetic and is more action-oriented than Facebook.”

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