It is just in the beginning it takes time to build a healthy, sustaining community and we really want to build this slow, build it in quality, and attract people in a natural, organic way, explains Matthews.

The Wells Fargo community site also provides links to the bank’s Student Centre for resources that can guide prospective students finance their higher education

The community is a way for us to help customers engage with Wells Fargo providing tools is really a way to augment the discussions and when it is time for them to apply for a student loan, we hope they think about Wells Fargo, says Matthews.

Wells Fargo is, however, tracking a lot thing about the new community from how people are finding the website to what is being said about it.

We are also tracking whether or not they go from installment loans online the community to WellsFargo and whether they are using any tools that are given in our website, informs Matthews.

From Wells Fargo’s perspective, the community website is a forum with great information where the lender is sharing tools to hep people figure out what they can afford and how that will effect their financial situation

Considering banks don’t generally offer such community services, Wells Fargo’s competition lies beyond the lender space among organsiations that run websites discussing the topic of education financing.

A lot of these organisations often don’t have the names that go alongside it. Because Wells Fargo is reviewing the answers that people provide, we are making sure that the information is accurate. That has increased the level of trust that customers can have in the advice and opinions they get. That is how we vary with other community sites you don’t necessarily have an oversight around the quality of information on them.

The Wells Fargo community has a few moderators and they play different roles, according to Matthews, from reviewing posts to providing additional information and links from useful articles and blogs.

Wells Fargo team members are also welcome to join and ask questions some of them are parents and students who have questions just like our customers do. But really it is the users themselves that are driving the questions and answers on the community, adds Matthews.

Matthews is pleased with the early results that the community website has already garnered and being no stranger to social media successes, Wells Fargo is expecting the website to be a fruitful addition to its digital channels strategy.

I manage our Twitter handle ‘ we launched that in 2009 and we did that because we saw our customers were talking about their experiences with Wells Fargo on Twitter.

We started the channel with the main purpose of engaging with our customers thanking them, answering questions, offering help and it has been fantastic. Because there is such a connection between customers’ mobile usage and Twitter, we see a lot of people tweet right after they have walked out of a store or used an ATM, says Matthews.

If a customer, however, is not satisfied with a particular interaction with Wells Fargo, Twitter provides a great opportunity to reach out and offer help, according to Matthews.

We make sure that customer gets the top level support, we follow up with them and make sure their issue are resolved and we get a lot of positive feedback about that. It is really just a next generation customer support tool.

To monitor progress on social media, Wells Fargo, at present, has an interesting mix of a couple of different tools that serve different purposes, though the full vendor space around social media tracking and analytics is still very young, according Matthews.