Social Media Strategy Review: Aviva Life Insurance

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.

Earlier insurance was a boring sector. The communication efforts of the sector circled around numbers, life expectancy, and death. Insurance agents had morbid interest in death, and they use the D word to take their clients to the end of their decision making process to make them sign the dotted lines. But it was not a healthy strategy and it even didn't work for a great many.

It is only when some well-known global players joined the game that nature, mode, and tonality of communication changed. This is an old story, but worth reminding us of because the company I am going to study for its social media participation belong to this sector only. Aviva is a key player in insurance sector in India, and does some good job on social media. In this article we shall see how it fares

Audience Analysis of Aviva:

For a life insurance company, whose target audience is primarily men, Aviva has a high percentage of female Facebook fans (see image below). This is a unique trend, but at this point, we will not jump to any conclusion, instead, we will wait till the end to understand why Aviva has 44.74% female fans as against 52.23% male fans of 376,364 total fans.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

People in the age group 31-40 (35.96%) make the largest demographic group present in Aviva’s fandom, followed by 29.82% people in 40+ age-group. There are some below-20 people as well (14.91%). Their reason for being on Aviva’s fan page is hard to understand, more so, because, as evident from the second image, the group has not much to say about the brand – neither positive nor negative – particularly male audience. The sentiment analysis suggests (see the image below) that older fans have more complains from the brand than their younger counterparts, and females are more unsatisfied than are males, across the age groups.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Overall Strategy:

Informing and educating people through various mediums is what almost all insurance companies have as their central agenda, but for Aviva this has given a different meaning to this.

The insurance company is using social platform to educate its audience, but not only on topics related to finance and insurance. It has taken educating people to a different level. Taking father as the subject of its communication, the brand tries to help father shape the life of their kids (see an example post below). The brand also hosts contests and quizzes to keep people actively engaged on social media.

Aviva on Facebook:

Aviva has 376,364 fans on Facebook, but the number of actively engaged fans is on the lower side. At the time of writing, the page hardly had 5% actively engaged fans. If you look at the following graph, you will find that engagement had been a rollercoaster ride for the brand between 1000+ and zero.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

The analysis of various posts has also suggested that the average response per post is a little low for a brand which has more than 350,000 Facebook fans.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

There have been posts which clocked more than a handful of likes and comments, but then it had Sachin Tendulkar in the frame.

Content-wise Aviva has done a decent job. It has not only created some cool content pieces to help parents educate their kids about various things, but have also created some nice graphics to go with them. It is very rare that a brand goes that far in creating custom graphics for so many posts.

Aviva has also used its brand ambassador Batting Maestro Sachin Tendulkar to create some very engaging content. The batting tutorial series has been particularly engaging, so much so that the brand page of the batting genius has also promoted its content and poll, as you can see in the following image.

Aviva on Twitter:

For Aviva, twitter has been a medium for making announcements, educating people, sharing content, and hosting contests. In a nutshell, the brand has used twitter in all kinds of different ways. The brand has not only created its own content, but curated some good one from the web as well, an example of which can be seen in the image below.

Despite its effort to create some engaging content like asking open-ended questions, creating content, and hosting contests (see images below), the brand has not got so many followers. Aviva has only a little over 2,500 followers on Twitter. The brand needs to work on improving this number.

Aviva has also used twitter to bring people to its Facebook page by cross-promoting posts from Facebook on twitter. This is a positive use of the medium. It has also created contests for twitter. For example, on the Father’s Day, the insurance company has launched a #whosyourdaddy contest, but seeing the thin fan base one can safely assume that the contest didn’t get expected result. The brand should have also used some neutral hashtag to expand the reach of its contests. Such events provide good opportunity for brands to increase the number of followers. Aviva missed out on this.

Comparison with competitor:

Max Life Insurance is one of the key competitors of Aviva. Both the brands have their eyes set on same set of eyeballs, but it appears Max Life Insurance has a better hold on the audience than Aviva has, which can been seen in the difference in their fan bases, as presented in the image below.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Like Aviva, Max has also created some good content pieces. Although the brand has not created as cool graphics as Aviva has done, it has employed some creative thinking in the posts it has created, which can been seen in the posts it created for Father’s Day. It has nicely mixed parenting tips with stills taken from Bollywood movies to create engaging content.

This and other little innovations have allowed the brand to create a higher level of engagement than Aviva did. Max Life Insurance has surpassed Aviva both in terms of total engagement and average engagement per fan (see the image below).

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Aviva also lags behind on average engagement per post parameter. Max got far more likes per post than Aviva does. The story is same for comments as well, though Max has done just a little better on that front.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Conclusion:

The brand has created some really cool content pieces to promote father-son/father-daughter relationship, but by limiting itself to such content (mostly), the brand is becoming monotonous, as far as social media communication is concerned. There are quite a number of things to talk about and a handful of different stakeholders to talk to.

Just sticking all the time to the stance it has taken in its commercials will hinder the brand in reaching its full potential on social media. The brand needs to look beyond father-son/father-daughter paradigm to include others in the fold as well. This will help Aviva boost engagement. I think it is because of the parenting tips that Aviva has shared on Facebook that there are so many female followers of the brand on social media.

The contests hosted on both Facebook and Twitter are good and engaging. The brand has done a decent job in syncing both social platforms to promote its content. In the concluding line I will say, Aviva has done a decent job, but it needs to widen its net without losing its focus, and get others in the fold as well.

EXPERT VIEW:

Insurance as a category is concept selling and hence there is no physical product to showcase. Therefore many brands in this category have to take the emotional connect route at branding their offerings. In the insurance space there are two kinds of brands one are banks like HDFC, ICICI and Kotak who have the advantage of bank brand equity when it comes to their insurance products and then there are standalone insurance players like Aviva and Max.

Aviva has the distinct advantage of having a brand ambassador who is liked by the entire nation. Yet Max Life seems to be doing better on social media. I think the brand needs to move out of the advisory mode of preaching tips to a participatory mode where its soliciting what people feel about their children and family.

The broadcasting mode can get monotonous and also tends to alienate those who feel they know more than the brand page does.

Expert View by Rajiv Dingra Founder & CEO of WATConsult – An Award Winning Social Media Agency.

Analytics support courtesy: Simplify360