Absa Bank announced its first foray into the social media world in May last year. It started with Facebook. Says Absa’s Internet Channel head Carl Louw: “Facebook is the most widely used internet application in South Africa. Yes, you get MySpace [and others], but from our network traffic access levels, it looks like Facebook is the biggest player, so we picked it to get our toes wet. It was new territory, so we started with the non-confrontational stuff. We didn’t want to go into social media with a hard sell.”

Absa kicked off its Facebook presence with a competition (offering an Apple MacBook) based around its ‘Put your best foot forward’ campaign. “The campaign was inspirational and the competition encouraged people to give us their inspirational views,” says Louw. “We aimed to start a conversation and start building a community on Facebook.” The competition attracted 450 entries, and the Facebook site some 1 200 fans within a month.