In this episode, Meredith Olmstead and Sophie Bawany tackle common myths about using Instagram for banks and credit unions. From replying to comments to using hashtags wisely, they share what actually works to boost engagement without burning out your team.
Key Takeaways:
Replying Still Matters: Responding to comments and direct messages can increase reach by up to 35 percent. Even quick replies help build trust and loyalty.
Focus on Quality Over Quantity: Posting two or three strong, shareable posts each week works better than daily filler content. Captions over 150 words are also seeing higher saves.
Small Can Win: Micro-influencers and smaller, engaged followings can deliver better results than huge but passive audiences. Relevance beats reach every time.
Transcription:
Meredith Olmstead:
If you're looking for best practices for your bank or credit union, join us while we talk all things sales, marketing, and strategy for financial institutions. Let's make it happen with Fi Grow Solutions.
Hi there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of Fi Grow Solutions. We are a digital marketing and sales consulting agency, and we work exclusively with credit unions and community banks. I am here with Sophie Bawany. Sophie is like our social media guru slash project manager, inbound marketing strategist, and all things implementation really for clients, but she brings a tremendous amount of social media expertise. So say hi, Sophie.
Sophie Bawany:
Hi guys.
Meredith Olmstead:
So Sophie, we were actually presenting to a client, I guess it was last week, wasn't it? So we were presenting and talking about, we were kind of wrapping up or doing some ongoing training around social media best practice. Specifically, we happen to be talking about Instagram.
And I loved so much of what she was sharing and it was so current and so relevant that I was like, you know what, Soph? We're going to turn this into a podcast. So we're going to get back on a call, we're going to hit record, and I want to talk about these things for everybody. So basically she put together a short summary of Instagram myths busted. Okay, so these are false assumptions about social media, specifically about the channel Instagram and how it's working well for everyone. But specifically we work with banks and credit unions. And so when you're working with a credit union smaller team, they really want to personalize and humanize their brand because that is what sets apart a regional community bank or a credit union. And so Instagram's a great way to do that. And so Sophie was diving in with one of our clients around busting some of these myths and making sure they knew what they really needed to be doing even halfway through 2025 and ongoing.
So this is not old stuff. This is new best practices for Instagram. So the first one that you mentioned was the myth that you don't need to reply to comments. And this one is tricky, right? Because sometimes people will just put a thumbs up as a comment or whatever. So there are going to be scenarios where your team can't quite keep up with every comment all the time. You're not probably not going to have a 100% reply rate, but it is a myth that you don't need to reply. So where do you think... There's got to be a middle ground. Where do you think people should be prioritizing their staff, efforts, and time?
Sophie Bawany:
I think it's also, there's another aspect to the commenting. It depends on if you're new to the Instagram game and if you really are trying to deepen your relationships and get your name out there, initially it should be every comment, even if it's an emoji. Reply with an emoji and a couple of phrases after that, it's okay. It doesn't need to be super deep and meaningful. But what we've noticed is brands that make a conscious effort to reply to their direct messages and their comments beneath posts are getting a 35% higher reach of engagement.
And that's a big number, especially for smaller brands that maybe aren't spending a whole lot of money on ads and they're only relying on organic reach. That number is fantastic. You just have to take the time to make a... And like I said, it doesn't need to be deep because what happens is these people may not be current customers, but when they see that response rate and they see that, oh, this brand actually took the time to respond to me, that's an easy way to convert someone when back of mind, they're like, if they're looking for a financial service, they're going to look at somebody-
Meredith Olmstead:
Who is responsive.
Sophie Bawany:
Yeah. They don't want to talk to a machine.
Meredith Olmstead:
100%. You see that on Google Ads, or Google reviews all the time. I mean, you think of it from your own individual perspective. If somebody puts up a great review or a really bad review for someone or feedback on a channel, even it's not Instagram, wherever, and the business doesn't reply at all, what do you think about that business? So it basically can be similar on social media platforms. Now the difference is people aren't looking at your Instagram every time they're trying to find your address. And so there is a little bit more value to replying to a Google review on your Google My Business page. It's very important, right?
So if you have to weigh your staff capacity, you're going to want to make sure that you're responding to all reviews, positive or negative, and that I guess you're first going to wait responding to comments that are business related or are lengthy. And then if you can keep up, then yeah, you try to knock it all out. You tell people, I love that you tell people that when they go on to post a few times a week or whatever, stay on the platform just for 10 minutes and engage, and it can just be that easy. So you're not just hitting reply or you're not just hitting posts. You're not just prescheduling everything all the time, but that at least periodically throughout the week you're going in and engaging in some way.
Okay, that's great. Now, do they have to be there every day? Now, engaging obviously would be great to be trying to engage every day, but sometimes it's not realistic. But do they need to post every day? Do they need to be posting? I mean, when social media marketing first started back in the year 2010, 12, 15, it was every day. Every day they were posting every day on Facebook, every day. What is it now? What does it look like now for purposes-
Sophie Bawany:
What had happened was when people were posting every day, the first thing that took a tank was the quality of content. So now social media insiders and the benchmark for 2025 shows us two to three quality, double underlined caps lock, the word quality pieces of content per week will get you up to 40% higher engagement rates versus brands that are posting every day, but it's-
Meredith Olmstead:
Just garbage. Yeah, yeah. So it's like an occasional meme or something funny is fine, but generally you want to be setting yourself apart in terms of thought leadership. You can be entertaining, but be useful, and being useful sometimes is going to take a little extra effort. So rather than spreading yourself thin and trying to post a lot, post a little less often, but make it better.
Sophie Bawany:
And the key word right now, the buzzword is... And it's something that's always been there, is shareable content. How shareable is your content? If it's not, not everything needs to be, not everything goes viral, but if somebody comes to your page and they can get value out of 60% of the content that you've posted, that's value for them in the long run.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. Now the other myth that you talked about that was kind of along the same lines of this is captions. So the myth is keep your caption short and sweet to the point, not long at all. What are you telling clients now about captions and length of captions?
Sophie Bawany:
It's the beast of social media. It's constantly evolving. There was a time when we needed captions to be short, snappy because people were just using Instagram as a visual medium. Now in 2025, we're finding captions over 150 words are actually getting 25% more saves. And we're seeing content creators use the caption almost like a mini blog series. So you still have a really, really one-liner that's your hook. Keep it in the forefront, and then nicely formatted. They're putting that information. And what that does is it enables and entices someone because there's actual information in the caption. They're going to save your content, and Instagram loves when you're saving content. It's the gold standard for any content creator that, oh, somebody's saved my information.
Meredith Olmstead:
And that's easy to do when you're doing things like recipes or fitness workouts or step-by-step instructions for something. Not as easy and as right off the top of your head for financial institutions, but you can think through it. Maybe there's five top tips for raising your credit score over the next 30 days, and you put those into a bit of a lengthy list and then it's saveable and it makes for something for somebody to come back to. They want to save it and come back to it later when they have time to actually sit down and do those five top things. So you can definitely find ways to make lists for this industry.
Sophie Bawany:
A bunch of seasonal content like summer savings challenges or stuff that has longevity for a few months, and people will go back and say, okay, well, what do I need to do? Very easy and saveable content.
Meredith Olmstead:
So two more myths. The second to last one you talked about is hashtags are dead. The myth that hashtags are dead. Now, I remember back when Instagram was really getting going with hashtags and we would've put 20 hashtags, sometimes you would put them in the content or the actual comment at the end. Sometimes you would put it in a comment after you put the caption there. It was six one half dozen the other, but there was always 10 to 20 hashtags. What are you telling people now?
Sophie Bawany:
Hashtags, man. So the good thing is Instagram's creator report actually launched and released the strategy saying that you should have three to five targeted hashtags, and that will get you 23% more reach than none. But that's kind of the sweet spot. If there's something really relevant, sure, go to maybe 10, but the days of 25 hashtags and 50 hashtags, fortunately that's gone.
Meredith Olmstead:
You don't need to do hashtags that are just super, super vague, like hashtag love you or something silly like that. But it might make sense to use a hashtag that is more subject matter relevant, has more subject matter relevance to whatever the content is that you're sharing. If people go in and they're looking for tax saving tips in a hashtag or something like that, and you're giving tax saving... You do those kinds of tips in your content, you want to put that hashtag on there.
The best way really is if you can think of a hashtag that is a searchable hashtag, you can go on quickly and do a quick search for it, see how much content is out there, and that gives you an idea of if it's worth trying to leverage yourself into those kinds of searches and those search results. All right, last one. You need to be a huge following to get results. This is a myth, okay? And this is crazy. So you don't need a hundred thousand followers as a bank or credit union to get some results out of your Instagram account.
Sophie Bawany:
Not at all. It is the era of micro influencers. Instagram has finally caught on to the fact that there are a lot of content creators and a lot of pages with a thousand to 10,000 followers, and they're actually seeing the highest engagement rates because when you have that following, the people that are invested are more engaged, so the creator is more likely to engage with them, seeing that it's a account, it's not-
Meredith Olmstead:
Makes sense.
Sophie Bawany:
... a million followers, it's 10,000 followers. So it's a more adjustable and realistic pool. I mean, micro influencing is so big for brands and for banks and credit unions because you don't want to advertise to everyone. You have a limited member, you have a geographical limitation. So stick to what you're good at, really target them and give them benefit that's going to suit them in their life. Don't worry about the 50 other million people, they're not relevant to you.
Meredith Olmstead:
And we're definitely testing that with some of our credit union clients because we don't need influencers that are world-famous. What we want is people who have community influence in a region where a bank or credit union serves their customers or their members. And so it makes sense to find somebody who's a small influencer. They may or may not have a tremendous amount of financial expertise. However, everybody needs financial products and services. That's part of living.
So if you can connect with somebody who has built trust with a smaller community in your geographic area, and then you can kind of cross-post, do a contest together, have a shared relationship with them for a few weeks where they're sharing your content in some way and they align with your values in the mission of your institution, it's a match made in heaven. So you can do a lot with five or 10,000 followers and you don't need to kind of be paying for likes and shares and comments from all over the world.
Awesome. All right, well, I'm so glad we were able to capture all of this, Sophie. I think this is really good content and very, very current, and so I'm excited to see if people have other comments or other tips they want to share. But otherwise, if you're interested in learning more about social media marketing or digital marketing for your credit union or community bank, please visit us at FIGROW.com. We have lots of other podcasts, blogs, eBooks, case studies. And otherwise, let's just all get out there and make it happen.