Like I have said time and again, ecommerce is just starting out in India. In 2009, this industry segment was valued at around $2.5 billion. It is projected that the market will be worth around $34 billion by 2015.
Ecommerce and social media go hand in hand. Social media plays a crucial role in helping an ecommerce brand reach out to its target customers and grow. Social media rules the online world and most purchases online happen but to recommendations over social media.
The awesome folks at BoxMyTalk have done an amazing research in this area and have presented us with their findings. They monitored social interaction data of around 100 ecommerce Indian brands comprising of about 1.5 million mentions from September to December 2012 to arrive at the following findings.
Here is a brief based on that report:
1. Customer Satisfaction
The above analysis is a result of monitoring a total of 7,889 conversations between consumers and brands. As is clear from the chart, Flipkart and Jabong are way up there in terms of customer satisfaction whereas Cleartrip and Indiaplaza are doing a terrible job.
The reason why Flipkart and Jabong are at the top is because they have effectively used social media to address customer issues. Their communications are quick and friendly.
2. Brand Sentiment Score
Flipkart leads here too, closely followed by HomeShop18. This score is a measure of the overall sentiment of the brand. Basically, this is a measure of how brands interact with customers. Having a positive attitude towards customers, being nice to them, sharing deals and offers are different ways in which brands increase their positivism around customers.
3. Response Time
Now, this is interesting. As you can see, almost all the brands have a very low response time (in hours) and generally reply within an hour.
Clearly, Indiaplaza has a lot of work to do. Considering Brand Agility, which is basically how many times a brand responds to queries within an hor, MakeMyTrip is a clear winner replying to most number of tweets within an hour. Myntra, Cleartrip and Flipkart follow.
4. User and Brand Tweets By Time of the Day
Users are actively querying brands round the clock with more than 100 queries per hour coming between 9.00 AM to 1.00 AM. This number crosses more than 500 queries between 4.00 PM and 5.00 PM.
Brands on the other hand reply mostly during office hours and are quick in responses between 11.00 AM to 6.00 PM. Considering the number of queries coming in at out-of-office hourse, it becomes even more necessary to have a 24×7 social media customer service channel so that there are no backlogs and positivity can be maintained with customers.
5. Follower Counts
This report was generated after tracking the social media efforts of these brands for a period of 27 weeks.
On the whole, most brands have shown positive growth. Of course, Flipkart has seen exceptional growth in these 27 weeks.
6. Delivery and Customer Service
Flipkart and Jabong came up trumps on delivery criterion with 65 percent positive sentiment. Infibeam performed worst of the lot with less than 20 percent users showing positive sentiment.
Jabong seems to have figured out the Customer service puzzle in India, as they had over 92 percent positive users talking positively about their customer service. It is shocking to know that MakeMyTrip had lowest score among top sites with nearly 50 percent talking negatively about them on Social Media.
7. Overall Brand Perception
Delivery and customer service are definitely some important aspects which come in to play when measuring overall brand perception. But there are many others factors which help in creating a positive brand perception among customers, like pricing, offers, news, etc.
Myntra has the most positivity attached to it followed by HomeShop18 and Flipkart.
The good thing is that brands are maturing and so is the market as almost all major brands have close to 80% positive sentiments attached to them.
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The report definitely brings in some unexpected figures but nonetheless we think it is a good analysis of the interaction between social media and ecommerce brands.
You can download the full report and of course, do let us know what you think about this.
