Now more than ever, brands of all shapes and sizes are looking for their piece of the social media pie. Some businesses are a good fit while others suffer from a lack of a coherent social strategy. Peoples Trust & Savings Bank would be the former. Earlier in the year we gave our presentation Growing Your Business with Social Media to the team at the bank. As we internalized how all of the different channels could work for the bank, we were struck by an insight. The key to social media is socializing — interacting with people. If you do this well as a business — whether it’s at a drive-up window or a call center — social media is a blissfully simple channel to integrate. This mean that Peoples Bank had a unique social media opportunity.

Everyone at Peoples Bank is dedicated to their mission of people first banking. Though it often sits below the logo, we’re always hesitant to call it a slogan. People first banking is a not just marketing sizzle, it literally informs every decision the bank makes. Whether it’s making sure there’s always a real person answering the phone during business hours or a team member offering to meet after work to accommodate a customer’s schedule, everyone at Peoples Bank practices people first banking.

Our first step was to advise them on which channels to maintain a presence. Ultimately we decided on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Next we created YouTube content and worked with the team on communicating via Facebook and Twitter. The biggest piece of the bank’s social strategy was yet to come. In our early meetings with the bank when we outlined the obvious synergies between people first banking and social media, we sketched out a vision to create a true social media portal that would aggregate all of this activity at one location. What else to call it but peoplefirstbanking.com.

In addition to being the centerpiece of a cohesive social strategy, this portal became the new “marketing front door” as we began driving our other communication efforts for the bank (online display ads like the one above plus radio and print) to this URL rather than the bank’s website. Plus peoplefirstbanking.com is a better echoic URL for traditional media that depends on recall as opposed to the bank’s core URL ptsbank.com. This new portal is also literally a front door as users have the option of clicking through to the bank site.

With peoplefirstbanking.com up, any number of Peoples Bank team members can push updates through to the portal easily using Facebook and Twitter. And because this URL is only being marketing through our campaigns, the traffic reports from Google Analytics provide insight into the overall effectiveness of our efforts.

Social media is an amazing platform for businesses to tell their story. Its impact can be magnified when there is a sound communications strategy behind it. However, the true driving force behind any successful social media strategy is a business that understands how to put people first.