“I’m not sure I want to be followed by my bank.” This was the reaction of one of First Direct’s customers when the online bank established a Twitter account. But after the bank’s head of PR Amanda Brown joined the conversation – as the Twitterati like to say – the customer changed his mind and tweeted that it was “kind of cool” for the bank to be embracing social media.

First Direct is one of the small but growing band of UK financial companies that are turning to Twitter and other social networks as a way of promoting their activities.

Brown sees social media as getting back to the roots of public relations. “It’s about talking to your customers through a medium. Social media is actually going to be really important in public relations terms but it is trying to understand what is relevant to us and what is not,” she says.

The bank, which will this week launch a social media newsroom aimed not only at professional financial journalists but also at bloggers and ‘prosumers’, is unlike some other corporate presences on Twitter in that it does not currently get involved in extensive customer service dialogue.

“At this point in time, I have made a conscious decision not to,” says Brown. “If people want to communicate with each other, I don’t feel it is up to us to interrupt them. On the odd occasion, we have seen a customer confused about something and I might go to that area of the business and deal with it. I would never delve into a customer’s account information.”

Instead, Brown uses Twitter to publicise positive aspects of the company that are less well known. “A lot goes on at First Direct which would not necessarily be newsworthy but says a lot about the business. It allows me to say someone has been sitting in a phone box all day to raise £3,000 for Childline. It gives people more insight into how we operate.”

For First Direct, a brand with a fair amount of goodwill surrounding it, joining the conversation with its customers does not appear too big a challenge. When I checked over the past few days, there were just a handful of tweets mentioning the bank. One customer had tweeted that he was impressed by the bank phoning him to tell him that a big payment was going out of his account and that he should transfer some money from his savings account to avoid overdraft fees. On a less positive note, another said he had been called by the bank’s fraud detection squad “one time too many” and was thinking about switching banks.

For other financial sector companies with greater issues surrounding their brands, such customer engagement can prove challenging. Mobile phone company O2 recently found this out when it announced prices for the new Apple iPhone 3G S. Owners of the existing iPhone unhappy with the cost of upgrading bombarded the company’s Twitter feed (twitter.com/O2) with abuse and even created a hashtag (#o2fail) as a way of grouping tweets about the problem.

ING Direct is another bank that has dipped its toes into the social media sea. Yet the savings bank has taken a different approach from First Direct. Its UK Twitter feed (twitter.com/savingfeelsgood) is updated three or four times a day but not with news of new savings rates or other deals but with snippets of good news.

The bank’s Martin Rutland says the involvement with Twitter is part of a broad advertising campaign that aims to get away from the doom and gloom associated with the banking sector at the moment. As a result, the bank uses a news agency to pick out a number of uplifting stories every day (a typical subject might be Horse beats man to win marathon). These are uploaded to the savingfeelsgood website and a link is then tweeted.

“On a broader scale, we do look at blogs and interactive websites to get a feel [of what people are saying]. We acquired one of the Icelandic banks in October and obviously there were a lot of customers concerned about what had happened to their money. It is good practice to read those,” he says.

One potential problem for banks and other financial sector companies wanting to embrace social media is the Financial Services Authority and compliance.

ING Direct’s Rutland says there are some restrictions: “There are obviously security issues; you can’t talk with customers openly about their accounts but if your customers are showing a preference for communication in a particular way then social media has a range of exciting possibilities.”

Social networks are also attracting financial sector companies other than banks. Price comparison website Confused.com uses its Twitter feed (twitter.com/Confused_com) to highlight news stories it has posted on its site as well as special offers. Recent stories include Seaside town mounts parking blitz and Credit card interest goes above 18per cent.

The company’s PR manager Kelly Davies also tweets at twitter.com/KellysDavies, which blurs the distinction between work and personal life.

“Confused_com hasn’t developed a personality but it is something we will look to encourage,” says Davies. “In terms of more personality, I am kind of being a corporate Twitterer. If I see customers using confused.com and not engaging with it I will automatically tweet them back. I think it is so important that we know what that issue was. Customers could be highlighting an IT problem that we didn’t even know about. Twitter has really highlighted to me how proactive I need to be on other blogs and social networking sites.”

Davies sees this engagement as a new form of crisis management. “A tweet can be as devastating as a negative review in more traditional media. You can nip it in the bud and the customer sees that the company is responding.”

Quite how avid Twitterers feel about financial companies jumping on the social media bandwagon is another thing – none has really taken off in terms of followers just yet. Well none apart from one and he’s not a person.

Enter Aleksandr Orlov, the meerkat star of the price comparison website comparethemarket.com’s expensive advertising campaign. His Facebook fanpage has now attracted almost half a million fans. Orlov also has a Twitter account (twitter.com/Aleksandr_Orlov) with almost 17,000 followers. The rapidly growing army of fans are not bombarded with special offers from the site or, indeed, anything other than pronouncements in Borat-quality English about his activities. People seem to join up and follow just for some light entertainment. And that, in a nutshell, seems to be what people want from their financial providers in the social media world.