Social Media in Banking. A Managerial Perception from Mexico

Nowadays social media has a radical impact on the business world, becoming a great customer service tool across many industries. And banking is no exception. Thus, banks managers need to identify ways to make profitable use of the social media. By accepting the benefits and developing their presence in social media, banks will be closer to customers. The objective of our research is to study social media usage in the banking industry and to obtain a managerial view concerning barriers and challenges in the social media implementation process. From the research of the literature in the field, we observed that Social media was studied a lot from the customers’ point of view, but there are not many studies on social media from a managerial point of view. This article presents a part of our research results regarding social media usage in banking in different regions of the world, specifically, the Mexican banking sector. We conducted a qualitative research based on interviews carried on among 20 banks from Mexico. The goal was to see how the decision factors in banks perceive the social media usage for their institution and for the banking industry, in general. The study focuses on the barriers and challenges raised by the existence and usage of social media platforms. The findings revealed an important presence of the Mexican bank industry in social media areas, but with a lot of room for extending the banks’ presence in new Social Media platforms, and different degrees regarding the perception of barriers and challenges in adopting Social Media tools.