This document discusses analyzing social media strategies of automotive brands in India. It analyzes the Facebook pages of top brands like Hyundai, Renault, Honda, Ford, and Maruti Suzuki. Hyundai has the largest Facebook community while Renault's community skews more heavily male. Honda saw gains despite lower social media publications than competitors. Analyzing mentions and influencers can provide insights into what customers think about brands and where attention is focused. Understanding the dominant social media forums and drivers of engagement can help companies improve their strategies.

1. Indian car market
Image credit: Shailan Parker
Shikharesh Das
A social media strategy
analysis of major players

2. Listen to customer voice.
Support service & brand strategy.
Validate effectiveness of strategy.
Influence purchase decisions.
Competitors are doing it.
Check ROI & fine tune your marketing spend.
Why analyze social media?
Image credit: mkhmarketing.wordpress.com
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3. Evaluate
and
prepare
resources
Agree on
a goal
Decide on
forums to
engage
Engage,
then
Measure
Review
and
analyse
Getting onto the social media:
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4. Indian automobile industry: a perspective
USA
Population: 320 Mn
Car sales: 17 Mn China
Population: 1.3 Bn
Car sales: 22 Mn
India
Population: 1.25 Bn
Car sales: 1.8 Mn
Industry estimates*
• Growing at 10%
• Contributes 7% of GDP*
• Employs about 500,000
• 65,000 km of highways
*Estimates pertain to whole automotive industry
The figures are estimations only as indicated.
2014
Industry estimates*
• Growing at 8%
• Contributes 8% of GDP*
• Employs about 5,000,000
• 75,000 Km Highways
Industry estimates*
• Growing at 5%
• Contributes 3.5% of GDP
• Employs about 800,000
• 92,000 km of highways
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5. Choice of companies for
this study
The brands needed to have a reasonable
social media presence.
Five mainstream brands with largest
following were chosen.
These brands seemed to have a clear
strategy to engage customers.
Mahindra and Tata was left out as they had
separate pages for each model, making
comparison difficult.
While the luxury brands may have a huge
community, many followers are not actual
users.
Mahindra Thar page
Mahindra Scorpio page
Chosen brands
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6. Understanding page and
listening
Pages
 These are created by respective
companies for promotion of brand or
product, on Facebook or twitter etc.
 Companies often pay for advertising to
boost visibility of their page.
 Community builds up when people like
or follow the page.
 The ‘Like’s or ‘Retweets’ are called
engagements.
Listening & mentions
 Listening is done on a bigger universe
on multiple platforms. It may be
anywhere. E.g.:
 A comment about Honda may be made on
Hyundai’s page.
 A blog may be entered on a comments
section on a newspaper blog.
 A Company needs to listen to all
comments about its brand.
Honda pages
Mentions for total industry
Honda has 1 Mn followers on
Facebook and 26,000 followers
on Twitter today. How many of
them are ‘engaged’ with the
brand?
Mentions may happen on
multiple forums. Companies
should have a way of listeningto
the customers, and a strategy
engage the influencers.
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7. Listening to customers in
Social Media Forums
Actual results

8. 4400
How do the brands stack up ?
3700
260
1070
1230
630
Facebook community size as of Nov 2014 in ‘000
Hits and misses
Miss: Promotes Nano as a
separate brand. For other
models almost non existent
strategy.
Miss: Every model has its own
page: loses value for upgrade
and cross selling.
Miss: A surprisingly non
existent Facebook strategy for
India - no dedicated India page.
Hit: Focused strategy for non
luxury segment – reasonable
twitter presence.
2900
2000
Hyundai
Mahindra
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9. Listening to customers:
The key concepts are what people are talking about now:
Industry overview
Hyundai
Maruti
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10. Brand
Total
Mentions
Audience
Potential reach
Weekly
Sentiment
Hyundai 15990 20% 72 M
Renault 6899 8% 61 M
Honda 26747 33% 128 M
Ford 25411 31% 203 M
Maruti 6411 8% 84 M
Weekly performance and potential reach
2
6
7
8
7
Notes:
1. Some media may have higher potential reach for same mentions, e.g.
National newspapers
2. Sentiment: Numbers may change when each sentiment is validated
manually and needs to be considered over a longer horizon.
1 2
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11. Sentiment's analysis
What are the customers thinking about brands
Brand A
Brand B
Brand C
Brand D
Brand E
Note: brands are masked in this analysis. An analyst will need to dig deeper into the
mentions and engage the customers with a clear follow through.
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12. There seems to be
peak activity on 25th
Driven by 3 major publications
On Amaze’ Guinness Records
Driven by
#WindsongHyderabad
Honda’s gains
Maruti’s hit promo
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13. Weekly activity trend
A. Peak across the
industry
It is usually driven by an
industry event like Auto
Expo etc. Brands can
gauge customer
response.
B. Individual peaks
in mentions
Normally would represent
specific brand events –
may be good or bad like a
recall.
C. Strategy to
manage
If there is a large negative
mention, company must
have a strategy to
manage before it gets out
of hand
A
B
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14. Mentions and influencers
Dominant forum
Facebook clearly leads in
this segment. Note twitter
is near absent here. May
not be the case in luxury
segment.
Redirect resources
You can decide to divert
resources to the dominant
forum in the segment. E.g.
Direct the agency to post
more in Facebook.
Engage influencers
The activity may be
happening on pages not
owned by you. You need a
strategy to engage
influencers who has large
following.
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15. Week’s top industry influencers
A top influencer profile:
250K followers, 1.2 Mn tweets
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16. Demography influence
on community:
Overall Industry
Target Group
-18 18-25 26-40
60%
55+41-55
28% 2%
0%
50%
40%
5%5%
Age
**age data is given for illustration only
Honda seems to
have a more
balanced appeal
within the
community
Renault’s
community is
heavily tilted
towards males.
May be result of
male oriented
product
campaigns
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17. How are company pages performing?
Actual results

18. Weekly analytics & overview of activity
Community Interactions Publications
Brand Total Growth Total Growth Total Growth
Hyundai 4.61 M 0.1% 852 -99% 63 -60%
Renault 1.35 M 0.6% 1.33K -62% 6 -57%
Honda 1.11 M 0.1% 653 13% 3 0%
Ford 658 K 0.1% 1.39K -45% 36 -14%
Maruti 271 K 0.3% 1.06K 1% 434 53%
Observations:
1. Total interactions dropped in proportion to drop in publications by brands
2. Honda’s gains came in spite of low publications – can be cross checked.
3. The reduced publications this week, could be result of increased activity
previous week, e.g. Expo or equivalent
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19. Highest Subscriber growth - Renault Most Publications - Hyundai
Most interactions - Ford Most mentions - Honda
Further analysis on the peaks available.
Note: here we are looking at individual brand page performance, as against whole universe
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20. Key learnings:
Dominant forum
Select the right forum for
the business. B2C
companies usually benefit
more from Facebook,
while B2B engagements
may be better in Twitter
and Linked in.
Understand drivers
Key events drive an
engagement. Companies
should leverage trending
key concepts in their
content strategy.
Increase influence
Companies need to be at
social media real time.
They need to constantly
engage fans and
influencers to gain
traction.
Start with a strategy
Important to start with
what the company wants
to achieve as retreats can
be expensive and non
performing over a period
of time.
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21. Social media strategy
and analytics
Competitive intelligence
and big data
Market Research
& reports
Email: sd@sprintz.sg
Web: www.sprintz.sg,
Linked-in: https://sg.linkedin.com/in/shikharesh
All contents are property of Sprintz Consulting Singapore and should not be shared, forwarded or reproduced without written consent.
This quick study is meant to demonstrate the power of social media analytics and numbers should not be used as conclusive evidence.
The respective brand names and logos are property of their own companies.
The analysis is complied from information in public domain, a list of which is available on request.
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