Hi Raffael.

Thanks for asking.

You are right. As most of the banks covered by this report are large financial conglomerates with multiple business activities serving different client segments together with many local business activities, often in more than one country, our choice of the most relevant presences for our analysis is based on the following criteria:

1) Each social media presence analyzed must clearly relate to retail banking or wealth management and not to areas such as business banking, investment banking or pure sponsorship presences.

2) In cases where a bank has more than one presence within a particular channel (Facebook, Twitter etc.), the presence with greatest number of likes/followers has been selected (in the case of YouTube the criterion is uploads) and, in consequence, the analyzed presence is not always that of the bank’s home country or of the group.

Our analysis focused on the banks’ presences/profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google Plus. In addition, the banks’ websites are scored in relation to their use of both social media tools (like RSS feeds and comment boxes) and content, such as blogs, podcasts or social bookmarking.

I quickly checked on how many presences of BBVA we looked at in our latest report: To provide an accurate analysis of the BBVA social media activities we actually checked 5 different Facebook-Presences, three Twitterstreams, three presences at Google+ and of course YouTube and Linkedin.