Indian Mobile Brands Has Gained a Good Share Among Mobile Brands
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
STRATEGY INDIAN REVIEW MOBILE BRANDS A Social Samosa Publication This ebook talks about the individual as well as comparative social media strategy reviews of 5 leading brands in India. The mobile sector on social media is fairly doing well in terms of product promotion, online offline integration and pulling off some good campaigns as well. However, it is majorly lacking in customer service, interaction and driving engagement. The brands have been analyzed for a period of 30 days, February 2014. We have highlighted their activities on primarily on Facebook and Twitter with the support of Locobuzz, a social media analytics tool. AUTHOR PROFILE APEKSHA HARIHAR Apeksha Harihar is a digital media journalist with a strong interest in analytics and strategy. She analyzes brands and their social media strategies and provides them with solutions that can help them derive real business results. Nokia has played a pioneering role in the growth of cellular technology in India. Nokia started its Indian operations in 1995 and had managed to be the market leader in the mobile phone category until it was dethroned by Samsung Mobiles in India. One of the major positives which worked in the favor of Nokia to be the market leader for so many years is that Nokia had a mobile phone for every Indian. A wide product range was a major reason for the brand’s success in India. The brand was innovative initially but was not able to keep up to the pace of innovation because of which it had to lose its market leader position in India. The brand has a very strong presence across the social media channels in India. www.socialsamosa.com NOKIA ON FACEBOOK The Facebook page of Nokia India has more than 10 million likes. The page also has many applications like Nokia care, 520 Speed Project, Nokia Music Theatre, Your Wish is my App etc. The overall engagement level through its facebook page is quite decent. This post is a product oriented post which has been one of the most failed methods of promoting a brand on social media. Promoting Asha 503 could have been done in a better way considering Facebook was a great platform to connect with young users who are actually the target audience of this phone. Though the brand has used the right hash-tags and tried to communicate the bright colours as its USP, it has failed to create any recall value. What Nokia could have done instead was a series of testimonials or reviews by users/bloggers and showcase it on Facebook to increase user interest and curiosity. www.socialsamosa.com Few post highlighted the features of the Lumia series phone. Data which is the most important thing in today’s world can be protected via one of the features of these Nokia Lumia phones. The post has few interactions as well. The other thing which this post indicates is the irate customer who has complained about some issue but the team was not able to meet the expectations of the customer which has made the customer even more irate. www.socialsamosa.com One of the major attractions of Nokia’s facebook page was the #YourWishIsMyApp campaign. The campaign was excellently integrated on the online and offline front. Events were created on the facebook page inorder to increase awareness about their offline campaign. The offline campaign was held across different cities in India and the same was integrated to their online platform via Facebook. www.socialsamosa.com A series of posts were created during the Valentine’s week with the aim of increasing customer engagement. These posts included a video of a guy who wanted to win back his Indian girlfriend and in the video he asked for ideas to win her back. The video series had a desired impact on the audience and was successful in engaging the audience to a certain extent. www.socialsamosa.com The above graph represents the post which the brand had on it facebook page. The numbers of post are consistent over time which indicates that the brand is quite engaging on the facebook. The quantity of post is also decent which indicates that the brand has content which attracts attention on the social media space. www.socialsamosa.com NOKIA ON TWITTER Twitter was used effectively to share product related information. The twitter handle had a mix of product oriented and event oriented tweets. Various hashtags were used to interact with the audience through twitter as a medium. The Nokia X series were launched during the Mobile World Congress held at Barcelona during 24th to 27th February 2014. The launch was integrated to the online presence of the brands and tweets including product features and launch videos were done during the entire week. Since it was the first time the brand was using Google’s Android OS, the launch gathered lot of attention on the offline and online platform. Besides this various contests which were a part of the brands engagement strategy were also featured on their twitter handle. The #YourWishIsMyApp contest which was held on twitter as well as had its offline presence was beautifully integrated on twitter and facebook. www.socialsamosa.com Another major event in which the brand was involved with was the Social Media Week held in Bangalore during 17th -21st February 2014. Social Media Week which is a media platform and worldwide event found its presence on Nokia’s twitter handle. This gathered engagement from the audience associated with the event and present on the micro blogging site. www.socialsamosa.com Various hashtags were used on the twitter handle to engage with the audience, create hype about the products and its features and also create awareness about various contest held on the social networking space. www.socialsamosa.com The number of tweets had drastically increased during the launch of Nokia X at Mobile World Congress held at Barcelona. This indicates that the product launch had an impact on the social media space. The brand could even leverage to the hype that was created about the products on the social media channel. www.socialsamosa.com The above pie chart represents the sentiments with respect to brands interaction on social media platforms. The brand has the least negative interactions among all the brands. Nokia has just 5% of its interaction with negative tone and the remaining 95% interactions had a positive tone. This shows that the brand’s online presence and content is appreciated by its audience. Suggestions Nokia should interact with their users and offer a better customer support service. They could use a tool that offers support in terms of CRM and track conversations that are related to them. Else, the brand is doing reasonably well on social media. www.socialsamosa.com HTC had always captured the market share of a premium brand and since 2006, manufactured their own handsets. After enjoying the top position, the brand began to fade after Apple and Samsung came to limelight. It is still eyeing 15% marketshare in India in the growing smartphone market. The brand has a presence on the social media world as well. In India it has a presence on Facebook, Twitter and other such social media platforms. www.socialsamosa.com HTC ON FACEBOOK The facebook page of HTC has more than 4.7 million likes. There are various applications as well on its Facebook page to engage with its customer. Few of the applications such as “Speak to us!” which is the customer care application, “Ratings and Reviews” which provides ratings and reviews of most of the mobile phones in the product line of the brand HTC and “HTC present How to?” which is a sort of user manual types application has a decent level of engagement. But besides this the overall posts and videos shared on the Facebook page of the brands are mundane and very product centric. Few post try to gather the attention of the audience but the frequency of such post is very less. www.socialsamosa.com Such product and features centric post are very common on the brand’s Facebook page and its time that brands start understanding that hard selling or direct advertisement does not work on social media. A campaign which was launched during the Valentine’s week managed to increase the engagement level for the brands. The campaign was simple but effective and used various components of social media. The campaign in-a- way was an attempt to highlight the features of HTC Desire 501 and at the same time increase the engagement across the social media space. It was well integrated across facebook and twitter. www.socialsamosa.com The above graph indicates the number of posts on the brand’s facebook page. As seen in the image the number of posts have been consistent. A few contests have been engaging the users. Besides this the new product rage has also been attention grabbing. HTC ON TWITTER The twitter handle of the brand has more than 26,600 followers but just 1790 tweets. This shows that the brand is not using Twitter as a medium effectively. The frequency of the tweets and the content of the tweets was also not upto the mark. The brand has an extremely efficient international twitter handle but the same couldn’t be replicated to their Indian handle. www.socialsamosa.com The HTC Desire 501 contest was integrated on different platforms where the brand is present. The timing of the campaign was an issue. As the campaign was related to the occasion of Valentine’s Day, the campaign should have been launched atleast a few days prior to Valentine’s Day but the campaign went live on twitter just a couple of days prior and hence couldn’t leverage the occasion.