IdeateLabs decodes India's engagement quotient with brands on Facebook

According to the study, Mahindra Group is the most social savvy Indian company, while comedian Kapil Sharma is the undisputed king of engagement

Shanta Saikia | Delhi | June 1, 2015

IdeateLabs, a digital marketing company focused on a 360-degree approach to solutions through innovation and analytics, recently unveiled a study on 'India's engagement quotient with brands on Facebook'. The study was done across 12 sectors – Travel, Retail, Auto, Electronics, Fashion, Healthcare, Finance, Food, Telcom, Entertainment, IT and Services.

According to the study, Mahindra Group has five brands in the Top 100 on Facebook and is by far the most social savvy Indian company.

The study also revealed that brands using celebrity content for social engagement perform lower than the industry average. Overall, Indian brand pages have a better engagement rate compared to global pages and posts from Indian brands perform better than global counterparts in terms of engagement with its audience.

As per the study, travel is the least performing category in terms of people talking about it, while three matrimonial brands are amongst the top most shared brands on Facebook. Comedian Kapil Sharma is the undisputed king of engagement, with more than two times the engagement compared to the next best. 'Comedy Nights with Kapil' receives an average of 1.2 per cent engagement per post, whereas the second best performer is National Geographic India with 0.61 per cent engagement per post. The difference in engagement is really vast.

Family genre content and humour on an overall basis performs four times better than the industry average.

Throwing more light on the campaign, Amit Tripathi, Managing Director, IdeateLabs, said, “The study was focused on establishing some benchmarks in the otherwise fragmented social media ecosystem and breaking the myth of assumptions with hard facts and numbers. The study analysed the top 240 brands and established the patterns in engagement with customers across the board. For example, the engagement patterns across the posts made by top brands in the auto sector in India benchmarked against their global peers as well as benchmarked against the relevant numbers across sectors in India as well as the world.”

As far as the methodology is concerned, the study identified the top brands across the 12 different sectors. IdeateLabs took the most basic benchmark of number of fans for identifying the Top 10 brands in each sector.

Basis this, IdeateLabs identified Top 10 brand pages across Auto, Electronics, Entertainment, Fashion, Finance, Food, Healthcare, IT, Telco, Travel, Retail and Services. A similar study for Top 10 brands globally (excluding India) was also done and built a similar list of brands.

These were studied in depth on a page level as well as at a post level. More than 2.5 lakh posts made by these brands were studied and the engagement across each one was rated on performance benchmarks and scores like engagement, virality, etc.

Tripathi further said, “Multiple trends were witnessed and in many ways, each trend threw a different light on the entire myth that surrounds social media as a vertical. For example, brands pages that use celebrities on a page engagement level perform lower than the industry benchmark, even though the individual post with the celebrity may have performed higher.”

He added, “Travel as a sector performed the weakest, whereas one would typically expect the sector to perform higher and better.”

“If one were to exclude the impulse based likes that posts receive, and measure a post on engagement (comments) and virality (share), then videos receive 50 per cent engagement and virality compared to the picture/ photo-based posts. The best performing post amongst all the sectors is in fact a video post, which garners the maximum traction (likes + comments + shares),” Tripathi pointed out.

He noted, “The study identifies the fan growth that the top brands have received across various sectors. First and foremost, the consumption of content and engagement of consumers on social media is on the rise in India. Brands recognise social media as a platform, which enables them to connect and participate in a meaningful conversation with their consumers and also using social channels to receive direct feedback from the consumers on business. Thus, more investments are headed in social media. Over 50 per cent of the CMOs who responded to the questionnaire sent by IdeateLabs spoke of increasing investments in social media, while 35 per cent spoke of maintaining last year's spends on the platform. This should result in a continuing growth for the social media initiatives.”

View the study here

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