Social media platforms have come to occupy a central role in the lives of most Americans. The majority of consumers are active on one or more platforms, and visit them on a regular basis. Although the platforms vary in their target demographics, characteristics, and reach, collectively, they have supplanted many traditional roles within the community. They’ve done everything from replacing local newspapers as a source of information to superseding front porch and water cooler gossip as a means of keeping up with acquaintances and coworkers.
Viewed in this light, any collection strategy that overlooks the importance of social media is doomed to be less effective than it should be. Social media represents both an opportunity to engage with debtors and a powerful tool to enhance skip tracing capabilities for those debtors who choose not to engage. Digital debt collection has a significant role to play within the collections industry at large, and social media can and should be central to the process.
Social Media Demographics and Penetration
Before a case can be made for the use of social media within the collections industry, it is necessary to establish its current degree of penetration within the consumer marketplace. The Pew Research Centre, which has been monitoring American social media use since 2012, conducted a survey in late 2023 which attempted to identify the importance of the top social media platforms both by age group and overall popularity.
Survey results showed that 83 percent of respondents reported using YouTube (the most popular platform) while 22 percent of respondents reported using even the least popular platform (Reddit) of the top 10. Each of the top 10 platforms, then, reaches a portion of the public ranging from 1 in 5 to 4 in 5 people. While heavy social media use is popularly associated with younger users, it’s worth noting that some platforms retain substantial popularity among consumers aged 50 and above, and even into the 65+ age bracket. The survey also looks into factors such as ethnicity, education, and income, finding similarly high usage rates across the board.
An additional factor in favor of engaging consumers through social media is that many of them may prefer this approach. A pre-pandemic survey of delinquent debtors performed by the McKinsey Company found that a majority of respondents preferred to be approached through digital contact methods including, but not limited to, text messages, emails, and push notifications.
While the survey did not directly address the use of social media in collections, respondents’ broad preference for digital interactions is difficult to ignore.
Using Social Media to Drive Debtor Engagement
Having made a case for the use of social media, we can turn to the practical question of how these platforms can be harnessed to drive engagement or inform collections efforts. We’ll begin with engagement, which when used effectively may help prevent accounts from becoming delinquent or at least encourage delinquent debtors to maintain contact.
In third-party collections, a social-media presence (if it exists at all) is often viewed primarily as a vehicle for B2B marketing efforts. So standing up a consumer-facing social media presence to engage with debtors may require creating a new social media team from the ground up or repurposing current resources to create a debtor-focused social media strategy.
In either scenario, driving debtor engagement will depend on a few key factors, well proven in other industries, which we’ll discuss in the next few sections, and – in some cases – through the efforts of peer-group companies within the collections industry.
Going Where the Debtors Are
Before embarking on a social media strategy, it’s essential to understand which platforms your clientele frequent. If you already maintain a social media presence across multiple platforms, you may know which one is the most active. It’s also possible to infer the best platform for your purposes from demographic research such as the Pew Research study cited earlier: younger users favor Instagram and TikTok, older users gravitate to Facebook, while professionals and college grads are more likely to be on LinkedIn.
Spokeo for Business provides a more granular option. Searching a representative sampling of the delinquent debtors on your books will quickly reveal which platforms those debtors use, and Spokeo’s powerful Application Programming Interface (API) provides an avenue for performing those searches quickly and at scale. Those in first-party scenarios can pursue more nuanced insights, such as comparing the social media usage of delinquent accounts vs. non-delinquent accounts and, when they differ, targeting platforms favored by the former.
Giving Debtors Reasons to Engage
First-party companies can reasonably assume that delinquent debtors, like the rest of their clientele, engage with their social media platforms because they are drawn to the company itself, its branding, or its products and services. Debt-centric content can be utilized to provide guidance and context for readers in the event that their accounts become delinquent, with an expectation that the content will be seen.
Third-party companies have no such established relationship, and debtors have no incentive to seek out collections agencies voluntarily. Content from collections professionals must position them as thought leaders and provide value in its own right by offering readers strategies for regaining control of their debt and guidance in its management.
Once a debtor-engagement program has launched, putting forward your social media presence at every opportunity can also help drive engagement. Call it out as an avenue for trustworthy information, engaging with service agents, or establishing contact with the company. Provide a link or a QR code to your chosen platform in every email or text message, to make social media an easy, low-friction point of contact.
Providing Value for Debtors
A collections strategy can’t simply revolve around driving traffic to the company’s social media presence. Debtors must also find value, either in a general sense from high-quality informative content, or in practical terms through easy access to information and services related to their personal debt.
Bottom line, companies embarking on developing a social media strategy must be prepared to provide content with some form of value. This would include allocating appropriate resources to ensure a steady supply of new content. It would also mean the company providing resources for the technology and personnel required to integrate social media interactions with its CRM software and the rest of the collections process.
Maintaining Consistent Brand Messaging
One final consideration with consumer-facing social media messaging is that it should be consistent with existing brand messaging. A bank that positions itself as a reliable lifelong partner in financial health, for example, should also cast its delinquency-related content in the same light. A retailer with breezy, youthful branding and clientele might opt to maintain a lighter tone in collections messaging as well.
For third-party collections professionals, the case is somewhat different given the widespread perception of the collections industry as unprincipled and threatening. Here, the goal is to position the industry as a whole (and your own company specifically) as a positive force within the economy.
Accentuating the Positive
That in turn raises a final important point that should underpin any collections professional’s use of social media. The emphasis throughout, whether in informational content for a broader audience, or private communications with an individual debtor, should always be on the net positives of repayment.
In part, this comes down to “selling” the benefits of expeditious repayment. These might include the rapid restoration of a credit line, improvements to a substandard credit score as a result of repayment, positioning delinquent debt as an inconvenience preventing them from enjoying life to the fullest, or simply targeting the emotional relief of getting out from under debt.
Generalized social media content can drive home similar messaging, and also help to demystify and humanize the collections process. A representative sampling of useful topics might include:
- Explaining the role of collections in keeping prices low and business afloat.
- Demonstrating transparency by explaining ethical collections techniques and regulatory compliance in layperson’s terms.
- Positioning your own company’s collections methods within that structure of ethics and regulatory compliance.
- Providing frequent testimonials from debtors who have successfully settled their accounts, in the form of feel-good stories about their relief and their plans for the future now that they’re free of debt.
The Role of Social Media in Digital Debt Collection
When debtors prove difficult to reach through the use of conventional data sources, social media and other open-source data are often able to fill in the blanks to help locate them. Once located, social media also provides a potential channel for establishing contact with the debtor.
Locating Debtors Through Their Social Media Presence
Debtors’ social media accounts represent a rich set of data about their lives. Many consumers are not well versed in their chosen platforms’ privacy and security settings, leaving their posts discoverable and searchable, and may also be injudicious in self reporting details of their lives and circumstances. The difficulty lies in locating those social media accounts, so they can be used for investigative and skip tracing purposes.
Locating social media accounts is not a strength with legacy data providers, but it is with Spokeo for Business. Spokeo launched as a social media aggregator, and this remains a core strength of the service. Searching debtors using their names or last-known phone numbers, emails, or physical addresses will return social media accounts linked to any of those other data points. Those search results may also include previously unknown phone numbers or email addresses, which in turn may be linked to still more social media accounts.
Browsing these accounts may then reveal useful information, potentially including (but not limited to):
- The debtor’s physical location.
- Previously unknown relatives or associates of the debtor, who may in turn have information about their whereabouts.
- The debtor’s employer (if applicable), and the employer’s location.
- The location of loan collateral or other assets.
Armed with these details, collections professionals are better equipped to locate and establish contact with debtors. A deeper look into the use of social media in skip tracing and debt collection has previously been published on this blog.
Contacting Debtors Through Social Media
The CFPB’s implementation of Regulation F in 2021 opened the door to the use of social media and other forms of digital engagement in collections, providing clarity for the industry over how they could be utilized and under what constraints.
This included the use of social media channels as a means of establishing contact with delinquent debtors. This remains a relatively novel approach, and compliance remains a concern. While the 7 calls/7 days limitation doesn’t apply to texts or social media messages, Regulation F requires that:
- Messages must be private.
- Messages must provide an opt-out method for the debtor.
- Messages must plainly identify the sender’s role as a collections professional.
A further pragmatic consideration is that while some debtors may welcome outreach through social media direct messages, and will happily engage through this medium, others may find it intrusive and react poorly.
This is a question that the company’s social media engagement team may be well-positioned to solve. Surveys, quizzes, and questionnaires of various kinds are social media staples, so using your own posts to solicit this kind of feedback can help establish whether direct messaging should play a role in your digital debt collection strategy.
Digital Debt Collection Requires New Tools
The new avenues for debtor communications that have been opened up by Regulation F won’t necessarily fit neatly into existing workflows, or work well with the industry’s established software tools and legacy data providers.
Transunion’s 2023 industry report reflects this, with many companies planning to increase their usage of digital communications channels or to implement new tools such as AI and chatbots to upgrade their level of client-side service.
The data to fuel those initiatives also requires the use of new and more flexible tools, like Spokeo for Business. To learn more about how Spokeo for Business can fuel your collections efforts, or to arrange a demonstration, reach out to our team using the contact information on our Debt Collection/Skip Tracing page.
Sources
Pew Research Center: Americans’ Social Media Use
Pew Research Center: The Demographics of Social Media
McKinsey Company: The Consumer Mandate to Digitize Collections Strategies
The Kaplan Group: What Debt Collectors Can and Can’t Do on Social Media
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Can a Debt Collector Contact Me Through Social Media?
TransUnion: Collections Industry Increasing Communications Channels, Diversifying Areas of Business