Social Media Strategy Review: HDFC Bank

This review is a part of our ‘Social Media Strategy Review’ series where we do a 360 degree analysis of a brand’s entire social media activity. You can read the reviews of more brands here.

Introduction

Started out in 1994, HDFC Bank is one of India's first private sector banks. The Bank's mission is to be a World-Class Indian Bank with an objective to be the preferred provider of banking services for target retail and wholesale customer segments.

Overall Strategy

A bank that caters primarily to the business community, HDFC is doing a commendable job both online and offline. It has established its presence on the 3 largest social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

In all these 3 channels, it is making all the efforts it can to not only address customer issues and market itself, but also as a platform to promote its CSR activities.

Platform-wise Strategy

Facebook

Boasting of more than 800k likes, HDFC Bank's Facebook page is primarily used as a platform to push its marketing messages. I find it a little overt in self-promotion. They could do with some more customer centric helpful updates, which are updated very few and far in between.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

And it seems they have started with Facebook Advertising aggressively. It can be seen from the graph below post December 25th, there has been a huge jump in the size of the community.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

And this development can be pointed out to the fact that they have come up with a '7 Day, 7 Resolutions' campaign. So I believe in order to give the campaign a boost, they began with the promotion ~10 days earlier.

Also to be appreciated is their use of custom tabs. Not only do they add value to the community, they are also helping to direct the traffic to the official website.

Twitter

HDFC Bank has 2 separate Twitter handles taking care of its communication. On one hand they have @HDFCBank_Offers which is primarily a marketing channel, on the other hand you have @HDFC_Bank which handles all the customer issues over twitter.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

And I must take out time here to appreciate the way they are handling customer issues. Not only the communication is considerate and explanatory, you won't see any template lines being parroted. Also, the people addressing the issues mention their names as well. Do you know any other India brands doing the same while handling customer queries? (Please mention in the comments section below).

YouTube

I can't believe that I have finally come across a brand that has absolutely no TVCs on their YouTube channel. Filled with rich and relatively long-form content, there are several videos that are helpful in nature.

This is what I would want a brand's YouTube channel to be. Filled up with content that benefits the consumers.

Though it is worth noticing that these videos don't have that much views. Which is natural as they are promoted  that well. The brand needs to look beyond creating content. Good content + Good marketing = WIN

Study of a Campaign

The 7 Day, 7 Resolution campaign is basically a discount/offer campaign which is exclusive for HDFC customers. But unfortunately, the campaign has failed to generate any buzz on Facebook.

Engagement Before the Campaign

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Engagement for the Duration of the Campaign

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

In fact it has lead to a decrease in the engagement rate of the community. You can see from the screenshots above that the engagement has decreased 66% with this campaign.

Comparison with a Competitor

The biggest player in the private banking sector, ICICI Bank is the most formidable competitor to HDFC as well. And though ICICI boasts of a bigger community than HDFC, the competition here is very close.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

But ICICI can learn many a things from HDFC's customer service team. It's about time brands stopped using template lines on social media.

Comment on Strategy

HDFC's community has a majority of people above the 30, the ones who are most likely to become their customers or are one already.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

It's just that they need to be a little less self-promotional and put more efforts into helping people with informative content.

Feedback on Strategy

Banking and telecom are two sectors where outrage is common and brands see a great deal of negativity online. But still, I think HDFC has done a good job at keeping the negativity as low as possible with the help of its effective customer service team.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

To wrap up the review, HDFC Bank is doing a cool job with its social media efforts. A strong focus on YouTube will help them a good deal.

To conclue, I admire Vodafone’s efforts at handling customer complaints via social media and I hope other brands follow the same path as well.

Analytics support courtesy: Simplify360