How Much Should B2B Fintechs Focus on Social Media? | Alvin Gunputh, Content and Social Media Lead, Thredd

Is it worth doing social media for dry topics or a more traditional industry like B2B FinTech? My guest today says yes, and he even says yes to investing in TikTok. As in if you're in B2B FinTech, TikTok is worth creating content for. The thing is everyone uses social media and in order to be where your customers are, that means having it as part of your marketing.

And in B2B FinTech, that's usually LinkedIn. As we'll see when done well, the ROI can be huge. This is what we talk about with Alvin Gun Poth, head of content and social media at Thread, who has a lot of experience in social media having run social accounts for all types of companies, including SaaS, insurance, cruises, and even surgical robots. He now works at Thread.

An issuer processor that processes billions of issuer transactions annually across 44 countries for the world's leading fintechs, digital banks, and embedded finance providers. In this episode, we talk about the types of social media post formats that do well, how threads LinkedIn Company Page actually gets quite good engagement and what kind of benefits they get from that. Whether it makes sense to be present across all social media channels or focus on one and do it well, and what he finds does and doesn't work in social media in the realm of FinTech.

Without further ado, let's get to the episode. I. All right, so the first question I'd love to ask you, Alvin, 'cause I know you've had, you have so much experience in social media. You've done social media for magazines, for SaaS, for insurance, for cruise ships, for surgical robots, and now FinTech.

What's the weirdest or funniest social media post you've had to create? Yeah, so I think the weirdest is probably. An interesting term. I think personally over the years, they've probably been quite humorous in terms of the posts I've had to deliver and humorous in the fact that they're humorous to the audience that we were kind of serving to at that time.

So for one example, the magazine you alluded to was for the plumbing and heating industry. So basically targeting your kind of plumbers, heating engineers, that type of target market. So one of the, and Twitter was very big at that, well, I say very big. It was just kind of becoming big.

So we really kind of, jumped on that trend of the growing user base there. And we were getting quite big ourselves on Twitter for that brand. And one of the things that we thought would be a good idea that we've seen previously done is using combining football and plumbing terms. So it's like, what footballer names could you come up with that also included like a plumbing pipe.

So that was quite funny and that would get really good traction, engagement. 'cause all of a sudden you'd have like this long thread of people kind of chucking in their ideas of, oh, this footballer, but include this plumbing pun. So that was quite kind of quite funny to see some of the suggestions. I wouldn't quite say it's weird, but it's definitely quite funny.

it's different. And then, you know, aside from that, having done like social posts with like Gary Barlow certain campaigns and things like that. That has been quite interesting and humorous in a different type of way, but I can't think of anything. That was really weird.

There've been some cases where it's been quite sad. So like for example, when COVID hit and when I was working for the cruise line, as you can imagine, travel stopped globally. So having to go out on social and explain to people that, cruises are canceled, this is gonna be the deal, and people have saved up their life savings for these trips and to have to go onto social to kind of communicate that and then deal with. The kind of comeback on it as well as you can imagine, you're gonna be angry, you're gonna be annoyed.

You can't fully grasp the situation. So you have to deal with that on social and it's very difficult. So it's weird 'cause with social media, you're creating content, but you're also doing comms at the same time. Do you usually only do the content side of things or do you also do the comms?

'cause obviously what you just mentioned there, that's comms, like, that's talking to customers, answering their questions. Which one are you usually, do you do one more than the other? Or varied. Yeah, it's varied over the years in terms of the different roles I've had, because funny enough, social media, the role has always been for me in different departments.

It's been in. customer acquisition. It's been in head of corporate communications, like it's been in different elements, in different roles I've been in. So for that particular example, that's what we would call as part of our crisis comms management.

because it was, a crisis. So there would be these set steps that were in place and rules that you had to follow and you would liaise heavily with, head of PR and external PR agency to help kind of mitigate all the risks and then come up with. A joined up communication plan. So, and then that would feed down to social, and it's like right here is the communication plan.

How, do you see this working? What's the strategy to help portray this on social media? Yeah. No, I know.

it's an interesting mix of the both actually. Just following on from that question, is there a format on the first question, is there a format that you've found works well? So for example, what you mentioned about using the names of footballers, that's kind of a format, right? So is there a format or type of post that you've noticed seems to do quite well over and over again.

I think that is a good format where you are coming up with something and you're trying to get people involved obviously, it takes a bit of time, but it's a bit like a snowball, right? So once you start throwing in some of your own ideas and people get traction of it, and then the good thing at that time as well on Twitter, you could. App people, right? So you can mention brands, you can mention people, get them involved, get them for their opinion.

Then all of a sudden it starts to kind of snowball. And I think anything like that where, I know nowadays it's a bit harder to get that kind of two-way engagement, if you like, on open-ended questions. But I think if it's fun and there's some sort of trivia behind it, I tend to see that kind of work better. yeah.

Engage people. It's just a shame that X, whatever it's called now, it's just not as popular. I've definitely noticed that, like before when you had an event, like an in-person event and people were like, oh, we're gonna find you. People would typically share both LinkedIn and Twitter.

Now it's only LinkedIn. Have you noticed that? yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? It's a shame really, because it was such a good platform for that.

and now it's just not as interactive. If you had to interact, if you were talking to a company, a brand that wanted to interact with its customers like that, where would you re on? Would you recommend they go do it on LinkedIn? Where?

Where should they do that? It depends, really I'm not a fan of kind of saying generically, this is what you need I think you have to be laser focused on your audience and as part of that you will know A, where they hang out and B, where they're most engaged. So. For me, that could be LinkedIn for somebody else and their brand.

It could be X or it could be Reddit. It could be Instagram, it could be whatever channel is relevant to that audience, to be honest with you. Yeah, makes sense. So, okay let's talk about thread.

What kind of social media content are you taking care of there? 'cause I know, for example, thread is very big on LinkedIn and you have actually a big following on your company, LinkedIn, and we'll talk about that. But aside from the LinkedIn, which I know also the posts, you put a lot of work into them. What are some other channels that you do or focus on or generally what kind of content are you working on?

I mean, as part of my role, so I look after kind of content and social, and when I say content, it's the kind of the blog or the articles that would appear on the website, which will then kind of break up into. Social snippets, if you like, and social content to help drive traffic, et cetera. So for us, our primary channel is LinkedIn. We do have a presence on X, on Instagram and on TikTok.

The latter two are very early in terms of testing. So as you've mentioned previously, we are in a B2B market space within the FinTech space. So talk about kind of narrowing down your audience. You're getting really very granular there.

So we are still trying to figure out how that audience will, how open they are to receiving communications via channels like TikTok and Instagram, which are still quite new, if you like, to B2B in general, let alone FinTech and the payment space. So LinkedIn is our primary channel. We tend to try to really push the thought leadership side of things. Over the three years I've been there, it's evolved because LinkedIn and audience appetite has evolved.

which has meant we've had to pivot what initially our strategy might have been at the start. So, before it tend to be a lot about kind of what we are doing, what we're up to, elements like that, who we're working with. And while the, who we're working with is still important, I've seen a big shift in people focus. listeners are probably aware and you and I are, it's that they're trying to be more people focused as a channel.

So they're trying to drive that kind of human to human interaction, and I've seen that replicated in our results as well when it comes to certain content types that we've been testing. So does that mean that you're also doing the personal LinkedIn posts of some of the people on your team? we're quite fortunate that we've had sign off now on an advocacy tool, so as part of our kind of strategy and to fall in line with what LinkedIn is pushing as well. 'cause I think it's quite important to listen to what the channels are saying.

Is working or is going to work or what new products or updates they're pushing. Because the more you can kind of stay on top of what the actual channels are pushing, the better your results are essentially gonna be, because, you'll be kind of ticking all their boxes if you like. So for us, we have a, a very. Experienced C-suite and a lot of knowledge, and they have a lot of experience that we are able to share within our market space.

So it's very important for us to be able to get those people out in front of everybody to help either tell our story, tell our partnerships, give updates in terms of what we are doing. And we are in the process now of developing a strategy to help kind of use this tool to perpetuate that if you like. Yeah, that's really interesting. So can you tell me a bit more about what that tool does?

Like how does it work? Does it take one of your recent blog posts and then tell people in your team this is how to create a po? Like how does it work? Exactly.

Yeah, so basically we have our own kind of content calendar, our social strategy content calendar if you like. And as part of that, I almost have to kind of think, right, this is the thought leadership piece that's going out, how do I then take that and break that into something that could be used for advocacy, we'll call it in this sense. So I almost have to do the job twice, if you like, or create another derivative of the post to say, right, this is for LinkedIn. This is how we might adapt it for Instagram.

This is also how we're going to adapt it for advocacy. So the people internally, like C-Suite or commercial teams, are able to then use that adaptive messaging for their own channel, because it's coming from them, right? It's coming from Alvin at Thread. It's not coming from thread.

So they would then go into the tool and publish it as if it's coming from them. They'll be able to choose. Pre-approved messaging that's already been in there and they'll have a couple of options, a couple of variants, potentially a couple of assets as well that they could also use. But at the end of the day when they hit publish, it will be copy and an asset that is coming from themselves to their network, which is gonna be different to our own company page network, if you like.

Yeah. Wow, that's really interesting. And I mean, you haven't started doing this yet, right? No, we are in the process.

We are testing it. We are testing phase at Because it'd be so interesting to see compare, right? Like the advocacy post versus the LinkedIn post. Which one's doing better?

I mean, I think we all know it'll probably be the advocacy posts that we'll do best, but I'm very interested to see how that works. Can you share the name of the tool? Is it a public tool that It's the advocacy platform by Sprout Social, Okay. Sprout Yeah, so we use Sprout social for scheduling now and social listening, and it just made sense for us to add on that functionality.

Yeah. Yeah, very interesting. But if we go back to like your company LinkedIn. One thing that struck me a little bit while I was doing research, was how your company LinkedIn posts actually have a lot of engagement as well, and they do actually quite well.

So why do you think that is the case and why do you think that case is the case and what are the benefits really that you've seen from that? It's probably twofold. So I think it has good engagement. probably from an internal audience, so it's probably, 50% of the share of those engagements are from people who potentially work for us or, are partners with us, and the other 50% are prospects or existing clients or partners, for example.

And I think for me personally, why I think they've done well in terms of engagement is because ideally I like to just try and tell a little bit of a story, try and provide some sort of value as well. So when I look at a. A social post, if you like, for LinkedIn. I kind of sit back and take myself outta the situation and think, right, if I saw this on a LinkedIn feed, A, how would I feel?

B, how would I react? C, would I potentially share it with somebody else? So, those are the type of things I have to kind of think about on the other side to think, right? Is it gonna land how I want it to land for our audience?

And if I can't kind of hit one of those three. Buckets, if you like, I need to kind of maybe revisit it. But some instances I like to do a lot of AB testing because at least I can then back up what I'm doing with data as to why something did or didn't work. And then if something did work and it's done well as mentioned, then we'll keep doing it.

And that's probably why engagement has continued to be quite consistent is because we have found a nice sweet spot in terms of what we know works and what doesn't work. Yeah. How do you AB test the LinkedIn post? Are you kind of posting and then waiting, or how do you So it's not, at the same time, it's kind of I see.

Oh, I see. As you're posting. yeah, let's take like a webinar, for example. You've got a webinar that you need to promote and you want to kind of get signups.

you do a video? Do you do an image of the speaker? Do you do the details of the webinar as part of your asset? Those are definitely three variants that I would test, and I'd give myself enough.

Leeway or runway time to be able to test those formats and then see how they're faring. So how is the static image doing? How's the video doing? How's just the event details doing and whatever performs best, I think, right?

I'm gonna do that one again and just alter it slightly and then push it and then potentially look to put paid behind it because organically I've seen it Yeah, that's interesting. I think what was interesting is that your LinkedIn posts are also very like focused on the educational side of things as well. You've got like videos, you're explaining payments, you're explaining different factors or parts of the payment process. So it's not just like, this is what we're doing, this is a new partnership, is also educational.

Do you think that's worked quite well? Do you think that's had an impact as well? Yeah, definitely. I think it's up to us and other brands to probably do that kind of side of things as well.

Obviously you have now, what is classed as influencers within the market space. Talking about those type of things. Trying to educate an audience on something that probably isn't as mainstream as. You think it is in terms of payments specifically.

So I think it's important for us as a brand to, as part of the thought leadership piece, to be seen, to be kind of owning the space by being able to educate and talk about what we know and help people understand better what they don't know. Things in terms of kind of global expansion, there's a lot of regulation, as you can imagine, in payments as well. So there's a lot that people just don't know, and it's kind of a, think as part of our responsibility as a brand is to ensure that we're kind of getting that across so people are fully prepared whether they work with us or not, that is a byproduct, but they can go away from LinkedIn or have seen a post and thought, I know something I didn't know before, or I Yeah, about something.

yeah, yeah. I agree. And what kind of benefits have you seen from this? Because you know how imagine it's kind of hard to attribute a little bit what's working, what isn't.

But has there been any like, I don't know, prospects that have come in saying, oh, I love your LinkedIn post, or what do you feel have been the biggest benefits of having a strong company LinkedIn presence and also engagement. Yeah. for me, again it's twofold and I think. Success could be split into two elements for me, because I think part of it is what people are saying about your brand offline.

That has been driven by what you're doing online. So for me, the biggest success in terms of, okay, I know we're doing something right, is when we or commercial teams go to events and they say, Hey, I saw that LinkedIn post It looked really good. It was really useful. that's the feedback I kind of yearn for and I totally get that.

Yes, leads and website traffic is just as important, but if you have somebody at a C-suite who speaks to our C-suite from a different company. And says, Hey, you know, I saw that post that carousel on stable coins. Really interesting. I didn't know it had that much traction.

That type of thing that when I get fed back that, that's when I know that we are onto something. We are making the right waves, if you like, in the industry, and we're appearing in front of the right people as well, which is I. Because there's no point. I know we talk about engagement, but there's no point getting all this engagement from people who aren't gonna do anything with you or your brand in the future.

So I'd rather have, quality engagement over quantity, for example. Yeah, and this is especially true in the world of B2B fintechs, like quality is often a lot more, you don't need hundreds of leads a month. You need just a handful or a few that are high quality. And I guess with LinkedIn, that's one of the big benefits of LinkedIn versus other platforms is you can be so much more targeted about who you wanna, share an ad to or whoever, rather than Facebook or other platforms.

So that's one of the huge benefits, right. You mentioned kind of a like, you know, I said twofold and the other side is obviously the lead side is as much as I, we yearn for that kind of offline interaction where people are kind of quoting your brand or your social posts as an example is, best practice is great. We also need to see how that can then convert into financial revenue. Like is it driving our business objectives?

Is it affecting our bottom line? And for me that's very important. That social somehow impacts it. So it is up to me to illustrate that appropriately and say, yes, this post is driving back to our business objectives to help kind of generate revenue and further brand awareness.

And how are you able to do that? I mean, I feel like social media is notoriously very hard to connect to commercial outcomes. So how are you able to connect the post? That post helps drive whatever more Yeah.

And And prospect. even with channels like LinkedIn, right, where we've heard they downgrade posts with URLs, which is kind of what you want, right? You need the URL to drive people to, to your landing page or website to then hopefully convert into a form. So, we're quite fortunate we have tools.

In the backend that allow us to kind of track these kind of engagements and interactions so we can track accordingly where certain visitors have come from. So we can attribute that to social, for example. So if they've clicked on an ad on LinkedIn, clicked on our social post, they've come through to our article landing page. If they fill out a form, we'll be able to track that.

We can't tell you, who they are specifically, but we're able to attribute a figure or a value if you like to that person or that individual. So that's one way that we can track it. But for me it's, yeah, as you said it's quite difficult. It's getting more difficult, I think Google coined the phrase messy, middle, right?

It's not linear anymore. The funnel used to be nice, straightforward, and linear. Now because of social, because of online offline interactions. For me it's about influence.

It's how can I use what I've got in my armory? If you like to influence somebody's decision to either pick up the phone or to. Go to our website and fill out a form, and we can always do the due diligence afterwards to find out where they came from on the call or via email to say, Hey, how did you come across us? Or Where did you see us?

So yeah, influence for me is very important. I totally agree. I think marketing is more and more those touch points, and that's why these tools like dream data and all that are very helpful because they kind of help paint a picture. I think ultimately it's about showing to leadership or whoever this is how marketing works.

It's that one touch point, that one influence. I think it's often like, also the way LinkedIn works is also about just being on your feed constantly. And I've had multiple times, like prospects or just clients even who have said. You just keep turning up on my feed and then ultimately when we are ready to buy whatever, well I've literally had people say that to me.

So how do you attribute that? How do you track that? And is that, are you saying that they see you or they're seeing your brand page? It is usually me because, I mean, we're a very small agency and so it's it's, I'm doing the posting rather than the company LinkedIn.

That's why I was interested about the company LinkedIn, because there's a lot of stats out there, how saying that. People like, I dunno, LinkedIn will prioritize people's posts rather than a company LinkedIn's post. So that's why it makes sense to do both. But we just do, I just do it myself.

We don't even do the brand LinkedIn really, because I wanna focus on what I think works best, which is the personal LinkedIn. just on that point, and that's why the advocacy side is very important for us going forward and why when I talk about pivot earlier on in, on the call, that's essentially what I'm talking about. It's right. We've had to pivot.

According to LinkedIn's update, and they wanna push more people. So we've had to adapt to that and say, right, you know, we're quite fortunate, we're gonna now allow people to post their content and use our page. It's almost like a hub, almost like content brand hub, if you'd like, say this is the master content, and from here we'll create variations for our teams to use on their own networks. Yeah, exactly.

How about TikTok? I know you've done a few talks and written and spoken a bit about TikTok, and I know you're a fan. What do you think about B2B fintechs doing TikTok? Do you think that makes sense?

Yes. Short and sweet. It does make sense. And people who say it doesn't make sense I'd like to think that they've done it and they haven't got results from it.

That's why it doesn't make sense for them. I wouldn't say, Hey, it doesn't make sense. Off the back of No data. The only way you're gonna figure it out is once, get on there, and you start trying it, for example.

So yeah, if you are a FinTech or in whichever industry or vertical if you like, then I'd say, yeah, just give it a go. But have some sort of plan or approach or strategy as to how you're gonna use the channel. What. how are you doing it thread?

'cause I looked for threads, TikTok posts on and there was only about a handful. So I guess you're still in the testing phase. Yeah obviously, I use it as a consumer and I use it as a marketing channel for Thread. And you're right, we're still trying to figure out where the sweet spot is.

And actually, when I look at some of the early results and some of the different formats we've done, when I say formats, I mean something where it's just. Kind of information, value led knowledge. So it's like this is what you need to look out for in terms of shopping online, in terms of frauds and scams. A video like that would do really well.

Whereas some videos where we've taken a colleague and say, tell us about your job, might not have done as well in comparison to that. So that's like, okay. So they're not necessarily, the market that we're after might not necessarily be interested in, you know what? Career looks like, but they're more interested is right.

How can you help me today in terms of, I'm on this channel, what is the value that I can gain from watching this video of your colleague talk about frauds versus scams, that type Mm. Because you think your target audience are on TikTok and they would are you creating TikTok content for your target audience, or is this maybe just for general brand awareness? Like do you think that your target audience would be TikTok and, I think they, it will grow. I think it's a very small percentage now and hence why I think the way I'd approach it to start off with is be very general and then as the audience grows, our kind of content will become more focused to kind of reach the growing numbers of target of our target market who are gonna kind of become more active on the channel because it's a generational thing as well.

Right. Also, one of the things that I've seen previously on data on TikTok uses is that one of the fastest growing demographics are people over the age of kind of 45. that could be roughly the average age of our, current C-suite in certain corporate companies within our industry. So yeah, it's kind of just playing to that really.

And just trying to make sure that we are a, trying to figure out what is going to work, but also. Making sure we're standing out in a certain way as well, because it you've got maybe one and a half to two seconds to grab somebody's attention on a TikTok feed. So it really needs to have some sort of pull factor to get them to kind of just watch the first three seconds. And if you work in payments, that can be quite difficult.

So you have to really definitely. that's true. But I, it is interesting. Yeah.

It will grow eventually. So maybe having that foothold there already will ensure that you're one of the first to appear when that generation does start to download TikTok. If you follow how LinkedIn have reacted right over the years, so even in this role, I've been here for three years and seen how LinkedIn has, as I mentioned, evolved and pivoted. TikTok will inevitably do the same.

haven't got a step ahead. Because we're on the channel now and we're active, we're able to stay in tune with the channel help recognize the patterns in user behavior because that will change. So we are gonna be in a better position in 18 months. If there is a big shift, we are able to shift and pivot more seamlessly than companies who are gonna come to the channel straight away at that time.

Yeah, yeah. That's a good point. Is there a B2B brand that you feel is doing TikTok really well? I don't know.

'cause you, you mentioned that you're a consumer as well. Have you seen any that do really well? Yeah I do like some of the videos and, they're always at the top of anyone's list. It's like Monzo, for example.

Monzo I know they're probably a B2C brand, but, I try and look at it with a B2B head. But then there's other brands like Stripe, Oh, really? They're on TikTok. Yeah.

So they'll. They'll do certain videos as well, which help highlight their kind of clients and customers that they've helped. And they've got really, really authentic stories behind them. They're almost like case studies, but you know, for social, first case studies built for TikTok and it's, yeah, it's quite interesting.

So those are a couple of brands that I've seen and I keep track on 'cause I'm like, oh, what are you guys up to next? And that's interesting and things like that. But. I still think there is a big opportunity for, especially in the FinTech space, for B2B brands to really make themselves a staple on TikTok.

I can't say that there's one brand who's really smashing it at the moment on TikTok, in FinTech at the moment, There's an opportunity there. a hundred percent. yeah, and this kind of follows on from one, one question I've always had about social media. I is.

are you better off focusing on one platform and doing it really well or because, the people who are listening to this, working at FinTech and they're maybe thinking, TikTok would be great, but we have, we're a small team, limited resources. Do we have a presence on every single social media platform and post everywhere, or do we just focus on one like LinkedIn and make sure to do that really well before moving onto another one? Do you think there's an approach that makes sense?

Here. I dunno if it, if the approach makes sense, but for me, I think it comes down to a few things. It's obviously realizing or trying to understand whether your audience are there. Is there the market for that channel, but then how do you figure that out if you haven't got data and you're going off generic data, how do you find out that your audience are there?

It's by using the channel, isn't it? You have to kind of use it and test it and say, right, we're gonna test Reddit for six months, or six to 12 months. We're gonna kind of drip feed content to try and establish whether it is an appropriate channel for us to use as part of our long-term strategy. That's the only way I can see you kind of figuring out which channels are best to use and why, as opposed to just a finger in the air to say, our target market aren't on Instagram, they're not on TikTok.

How do you know? Where's the data that backs this up? Always kind of just drill down granularly as to right, we are making this decision to do this because of X, Y, and Z Based on the data, having tested it for six to 12 months. For me speaking as a social media marketer, I would argue that it is in our best interest.

To know as many channels as possible. 'cause at the end of the day, I'm the company expert. People will come to me to say, I saw this on Reddit. What?

What are we doing? What is the benefits? Blah, blah, blah. And I need to be in a position where I have some form of base knowledge to be able to answer that question appropriately, internally.

Otherwise, I run the risk of not knowing what I'm doing in my role. So I would say I would advocate. As marketers, we need to have some sort of base knowledge of every channel that's available, especially when it comes to cultural differences and regionality. Apps our, a lot of our target market and apac, as you're probably aware, they have different social media apps, you know that.

And likewise in Europe, even like the likes of Telegram, WeChat, super apps, they have different. Modes of communication. So I need to be aware of that because suddenly APAC market could turn around and say, look, what are we doing on WeChat? We need to look at this, blah, blah, blah.

And I'll be, I'm gonna, I don't wanna be there like caught, with my pants down, for want of a better word, say, I dunno what you're talking about. I have no idea about this social channel. It's in your best interest as a marketer to establish what are the channels being used globally, where is our kind of main driver in terms of traffic? And how does that tie back to our company goals?

Okay. We're gonna give ourselves this long to test these channels and make a Yeah. Yeah. No, I like that approach.

I think that's very data-driven, methodical approach. Is there one channel that you feel is like underestimated or people overlooked? I mean, I guess TikTok is a little bit one, but would you, is there maybe a method or a strategy? 'cause you mentioned Reddit and I feel like I don't know any marketers who are making Reddit FinTech marketers that are prioritizing Reddit.

So are there any like platforms or approaches like that, that you feel are kind of underestimated in the little bits? More people should invest in them. personally, it would be Reddit. the capability that channel has, the growing popularity, the growing usage, the SEO side of things as well for that channel.

LLMs. Exactly. it is ever increasing. And just do it.

Just try, you don't have to post content. Just get on there and see what people are doing. I work very closely with our kind of digital teams to understand what our trending keywords are. Right?

So what are the key words we wanna be known for? I'll take that list and then I'll go kind of put 'em into Reddit and see what comes up so I can get an idea as to, ooh. This is interesting. I didn't know people were talking about issuer processing on Reddit, which they are.

They are. And the only way I know that is because I set up a channel and I set up. Notifications to find out when these keywords or go in and do the kind of keyword search query. And I see these words come up and I see these people having the conversations and they're mentioning brands.

They're like, oh, does anyone know what issuer processor would be good for this? I'm trying to do this. And other people would come up and they say, yeah, have you tried these guys? Thread Real life example.

Real life example they mentioned, and that's when it clicked for me. I was like, oh my God, if I hadn't paid attention, this would've just passed us There were this. Sub thread of people commenting and talking about something in real time, in real life that's affecting their real work. And we would've just been unknown to it.

And of course, yes, that happens on a digital scale. And like you said, we can't be listening to every single conversation out there happening in all these different forums. But Reddit allows for that. So I think that really is, if you're not on it today, start having a look and just start searching through those keywords, searching the conversations and then think, okay, there's something here.

'cause it really is a goldmine, I think. I think the thing about Reddit is you cannot be fake. As in like I, I've seen people try to hack it, create lots of fake users, create threads. It's very well moderated and that's why LLMs and Google rely on it a lot and rank it a lot like for LLMs chat be, et cetera.

They source Reddit a lot and Google as well. And the reason is because they know Reddit is very well moderated, so you cannot like hack it. I think from what I understand, the best way to make use of Reddit is to be a genuine user and love it and comment on people's posts in an authentic way. So some people might not wanna do that, and I think that's, well, that's opportunity really.

People who are willing to It's, it's crazy, isn't it? Because that's kind of why social started in the first place. Social media came about 'cause of community. It came about of having wanting a recommendation for something or to discuss something.

And here we are, x amount of years later, almost doing full circle to say hey communities are still important. Yeah, they're still having these authentic conversations that are really key and can impact and drive business decisions and marketing decisions. So why are you not paying attention to it Yeah, definitely. Are.

Are there any other, like, experiments that you've done? I'd be very interested in experiments in FinTech that you've done in terms of social media and they kind of, they've either worked really well or flopped. Anything that you've done there. in FinTech?

It's difficult to say they flopped. cause as you said, like, our engagement touch wood has always been quite consistent and I think when you've got a good base, you kind of know what's gonna work. But I do want to keep trying to push the boat and think outside of the box in terms of kind of creative formats. for me, I guess in some instances things that have flopped have been things that are probably not as exciting.

To the user. They may be exciting internally and it might be a big deal internally, but then when you try and vocalize that to an external audience and you think this is great news, and it doesn't kind of get received that way, I wouldn't necessarily class it as a f flop, but I'd say it just didn't land how we think, because sometimes you can get so kind of. Blinkered especially when you, all you have around you is just people who are obviously internally and you're not getting any sort of external sounding board, right?

So you think whatever you're doing is the best and this people need, want to know this. I'm sure they want to know it. They must want to know it. It's great news.

But actually in the real world, if you like, it's not necessarily the case. So I can't give you a specific example as to what's flopped in terms of format. it's just. I think of Yeah.

Or, Or what about one where it's worked really well? Yeah. I mean, for us, one thing that worked really well this year off the back of a industry event, so Money 2020 Europe, what worked really well was the use of carousels and being able to provide a daily digest of what happened on day one in a carousel format. That worked really well, and that worked For a range of reasons, because essentially we had a team on the ground who were able to kind of capture content and send it back and record kind of videos and soundbites, and we were able to kind of collate all that information together to then start.

Creating content for the website, which would then kind of be broken up and served on social. And it worked really well. It was received really well. Great engagement.

One of our highest engagement engaged posts this year. And I think a lot of that was to do with the kind of the value and the analysis within those posts. The fact that he had images and a little bit of kind of creative elements to it as well to help people stop in their tracks, if you like, in the newsfeed. Yes.

Like kind of multimedia using lots of different, yeah, no, very interesting. That's cool. I think that makes a lot of sense because it's also people on who were there actually money 2020 as well. This is relevant for them and it's a good way to connect.

Maybe with the people that the salespeople have met in person, it's like also on social Yeah, and like as I said before, like using, if you use, if you work in sales or commercially focused and you can use your company page as that kind of brand hub, so. Yes, it's great content for us, but actually it's even better for us, for our teams to then take and then send in a private message and say, Hey look, here's this roundup we did of day one. Were you there? Did you attend?

I heard you couldn't make it. You might find this useful. No strings attached. There's, here's some, useful content that our teams can use for their prospect.

Yeah. Yeah. No, very cool. Amazing.

Well thanks so much Alvin, for your time. I have one last question that I want to ask you, which is. You love social media? I can tell.

In the content that you create and in the, like, speeches you've done or wherever you've spoken what excites you would you say the most or fascinates you about social media and where do you think it's going in the future? Like, fast forward five years, do you think just everything's gonna be like TikTok? What do you think, what do you think is super interesting about all of this and what it'll look like in a few years? Yeah, I think what excites me and scares me and worries me a little bit is ai and it scares me because of the impact you'll have in an offline world.

So, as you a fellow marketer are probably aware the use of AI on LinkedIn is ever increasing. And now. If you use it a lot, you can spot it from a mile away. And I'm just worried that we may get to this point where we will experience, not us per se, but some people, creative fatigue of what is being generated by ai because it's so obvious.

I know the channels are trying to squash it where they can and label it appropriately, but it still is getting onto our feeds and it's almost like, right, how far away are we from just it being. A kind of constant drip of ai, dribble of just the same type of language and persona. So that's one of my worries. But then also because it's being used so much to help with content and copy, I'm worried that people will lose the lack or the skills to communicate in person.

Yeah, to think and just communicate in person. I saw this funny video where some guy was walking and this guy just asked him a question and he didn't know how to response. So he asked chat, JPT. He's like, somebody said, hello, how do I need to respond?

And it's like, it is. And it's like that. And it's almost like a look into the future. It's like that could be the possibility because we are using it so much for everything, for grammar for copy, for creative, that actually if you took it away.

how would you react? Would you be lost? Would you kind of forget? So I think that's one thing that worries me, but also excites me because I know the benefits it can bring.

I can see how it's being embedded as part of kind of search results. So for us, it's very important for content that we do, that we are doing everything we can to be focused on showing up within LLMs. Like it will have that shift where people go from Google to AI and rely on AI for search. So are we gonna show up in those conversations?

So I need to kind of bear that in mind when it comes to social specifically, what I think is exciting or what I think might happen is going back to communities. I think we're gonna see more and more closed, closed knit communities driving these conversations. A bit like the poor. Yeah, I think exactly like that, like a WhatsApp type group situation or a forum like Reddit that becomes very close knit, could be subscription.

Only you're gonna start paying for this, the privilege of being involved in these particular circles. And like I said, that's how social started. And I think it's gonna do full circle because people are gonna be fed up with the AI stuff. They're gonna be in these close-knit communities to discuss everything or to share ideas instead of sharing it online.

It's slightly pessimistic, but slightly optimistic as well that I am excited by it because then it means, as marketers, how do you navigate How do you prepare yourself for that? How do you prepare C-Suite? How do you have that conversation and say, whoa, it's a closed knit community. How are we supposed to get into it?

So you really need to kind of think harder about how, where you spend your money and your time to Mm-hmm. comes back to influence, right? Yeah, and I would even say like in person, communities are gonna become more important as well, just because of the social. And yet I agree with what you're saying about ai.

That's why I don't use at all now AI to do my LinkedIn post because I noticed that it was obvious and I also noticed that those where I used AI never had as good engagement because, and it's true that the posts I create now are very not optimized all over the place. The first sentence could be a lot better. But it's almost like that works because I notice now when I'm on LinkedIn and I'm scrolling, I much prefer, I always click on the ones where it's clear the person is just having a stream of consciousness.

And they're not trying to optimize it like crazy. That's my own habits that I'm not sure if everyone else is the same. And so I've stopped actually using AI for LinkedIn post 'cause I just felt that it was very manufactured and as you're saying, people could see that exactly. Yeah.

you're ahead. The game there, and I think, yeah. Head of the game by not using ai but I think there is a lot of exciting, like potential for other ways of using it. So what you said about repurposing, I think is really smart.

Or rewriting the copy depending on who's the person posting. So there's definitely a lot there for sure. It's yeah, it's just the end product maybe, I think that's where it strengths are. It's in the ideation side of things.

It's not, it shouldn't be your output. You shouldn't take what. Chat, GBT or LLMs have posted as an output, copy and paste. Personally, I don't think that's the best way to do it.

I think go back and forth and get to a position where you can take something and then put your own spin on it before it goes live if you like. Yes. Yes. I couldn't agree more.

Amazing. And on that note we'll end it here. Thanks again Alvin for jumping on. I really appreciate it.

And everyone who, who's listening, check out the thread LinkedIn company page. 'cause I think it's a really cool kind of, guide on, how to create good LinkedIn company posts for sure. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening. You can find show notes and information about guests at fintechmarketinghub. com forward slash podcast. And finally, huge thanks to Orama.

tv for producing this podcast. We look forward to having you on our next episode.