Social Media Strategy Review: Flipkart

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

India's most favorite ecommerce store. Enough said.

Overall Strategy

Customer service is where the core focus of Flipkart lies. Flipkart knows that as an ecommerce platform, if there is anything that will keep it ahead of its competitors, it is customer service.

And be it offline or online, people gush about its lightning speed delivery. So much so that Flipkart has gone ahead and created a Look What Flipkart Delivered Storify page mentioning all the instances where its delivery made made the customers happy.

And it's one of the few Indian brands which is actively using Google Plus!!

Platform-wise Strategy

Facebook

A simple Facebook page with friendly communication tonality. The content primarily revolves around latest festivals/birthdays, Q&A updates and self-promotional posts.

However, the lack of any interesting content has lead to a relatively low engagement rate for the page that has more than 1.2 million people in its community.

Customer service is again at focus here. The team handling the page tries to resolve every complaint that is posted on their timeline asap. There's also a well laid out Custom Tab just for Support. It's a helpful tab where customers can come and mention their grievances, share ideas and affirm their love for Flipkart. And it is fairly active indeed.

But one special mention goes to the team behind their cover photos. Every time there's something a celebrate, it is reflected in their cover photos. From birthdays, to seasons to festivals, they have a brilliant creative team that comes up with some of the best cover photos on Facebook.

Other than that, lackluster.

Twitter

Facebook may be a little downer for Facebook but their Twitter team is doing some kickass work. Thanks to some brilliant informal (and friendly) communication, they have managed to woo a lot of people.

Amongst the ecommerce sector, they probably have the largest Twitter community; and a lot many of them are influencers!

The updates are somewhat similar to Facebook but the real crux lies in how it responds to users. Not only do they respond and resolve customer issues, they also enter into casual chit-chat with their followers. How many brands even do that? I can't think of many!

YouTube

Again a place where TVCs are stored. But since the TVCs are damn interesting, no complaints.

Google Plus

Moderately active on Google Plus, Flipkart updates it once a while its self-promotional. Though it still boasts of a community with more than 12k people.

Considering how fickle the Goole Plus users are, the updates get a decent response

Comparison with Competitors

HomeShop18 has to be the most formidable competitor to Flipkart as they both sell almost similar set of products. Both of them have the largest and the widest range of inventory in the Indian Ecommerce scene.

Though HomeShop18 has a smaller community as compared to Flipkart, it is doing a good job at keeping them engaged with a healthy mix of interesting and self-promotional content. Even the self-promotional updates are mostly discount offers which usually get a good response from users.

HomeShop18 also does fairly good on Twitter with respect to campaigns but they need to better their customer service backend to ensure that issues are resolved quickly and there's no negativity floating around in the Twitterverse.

Comment on Strategy

Flipkart's emphasis on customer service and quick delivery reflects strongly in its online communication. The ideation of Flipkart Man shows how seriously it takes delivery.

The friendly, youthful communication also adds to the customer's delight.

Feedback on Strategy

When you have such a strong focus on quality, you are bound to end up with happy customers. And not only just happy, you have a legion of followers who are loyal to you and stick with you even when others are undercutting prices and selling products at much cheaper rates.

Kudos to team Flipkart for being so awesome offline, resulting in a positive online image. Now if only I could see Flipkart working on engaging more with its community, especially the one on Facebook.

Analytics support courtesy: Simplify360