Social Media Strategy Review: Tanishq

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.

Tanishq seeded the idea of branded gold jewellery in the collective consciousness of Indian middle-class. The brand is trusted by millions of buyers, more so because it comes from the house of TATA, a corporate conglomerate with probably the highest trust quotient in India. Since the launch of the brand in 1994, the brand has opened 119 exclusive showrooms in 75 cities, and when people moved to social media the brand, which has a good understanding of Indian consumers' pulse, looked towards social media too. Has it been successful in its social media effort? I am set to find that out in this article. Read it to the end, and you may find a couple of tactics for Tanishq's armoury to use in your social media campaign.

Audience Analysis of Tanishq

For a jewellery brand Tanishq, which primarily targets females, it has a relatively high number of male fans, as you can see in the first image below this paragraph. It could be because of a large segment of men buying jewellery for women in their lives. Although it is 31-40 age-group that makes the largest segment of the audience, the brand is hugely popular with audience across the age divides (see the second image below), but as the third image illustrates, not everyone is in love with Tanishq. The brand has a noticeable amount of negativity flowing through its social media channel, which, in fact, is proportionate to the number of fans from different age groups.

For example, if people in 31-40 make the largest segment for the brand, they also make the largest group of unsatisfied customers, probably because this group has more buyers of Tanishq than any other in the pie.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Overall Strategy

As Tanishq has "aspiration to own" built in its product range, so to be popular on social media, the brand didn't have to try harder. Just being there was enough for the brand. Such is the aura of the brand and the products it design. This is evident from the social media strategy the brand has adopted. It uses various social media platforms for product announcements and showcase.

Tanishq on Facebook

The jewellery brand didn't need to try harder. The beauty and glamour of its product has pulled people like ants to a block of sugar. And this explains the number of fans it has on the page, which, at the time of writing, was more than 484,000. But because it lacks an appropriate strategy for customer engagement, the level is ever wavering, and very few people go beyond liking the post (see the second image). The rate at which people share or comment on the posts on Tanishq wall is not very encouraging.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Only 2.63% of the total engagement counts are comments, and 5.26% are shares, rest of them are in the form of likes, but if you will see per post engagement than it is pretty decent, as evident from the image below, though comments are not as much as there are likes, partly because there is very little to comment about on the posts that Tanishq makes on its wall.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

To verify the data presented above manually, I skimmed through the timeline of Tanishq and found some posts with pretty decent likes, despite its overall like percentage being very low. Look at the following two images to see the engagement these posts have caused.

The brand has also taken an occasional contest route, which has created some buzz, but the engagement on contest posts is not as much as on the posts that contain images of jewellery. It appears Tanishq's fans are already too excited to see beautiful gold and diamond jewellery to bother much about the contests. See the two images below to see the difference in level of engagement caused by the presence or absence of an image of a piece of jewellery.

Tanishq on Twitter

On twitter, Tanishq has a little above 2,200 fans, which is not very impressive, and one of the reasons behind this could be the lack of originality in the tweets. Tanishq does nothing more than duplicating the posts it makes on Facebook, you can see an example in the following image, and as there is a lot of overlapping in the user bases of Facebook and twitter, people who follow the brand on Facebook has stayed clear of it on Twitter. The brand needs to do things differently on twitter to build a real community on this platform.

You work or your style? Take part in the Mia Woman contest and tell us your story. Click here http://t.co/7zKDdRGQf4 pic.twitter.com/2GQreG518S

— Tanishq (@TanishqJewelry) July 25, 2013

But a positive thing that you can notice on twitter is the amount of user-generate tweets you can see on Tanishq's twitter stream. There are some real conversations taking place, as evident in the following two images. It is only the brand which is conspicuously absent from the scene. Tanishq needs to find a way to make most out of it.

Comparison with Competitor

Kalyan Jewellers is one of the closest competitors of Tanishq, and although the jeweller in question does not have as huge a fan-base as Tanishq enjoys (see the image below), it has done some pretty decent engagement exercise, which reflects in the fact that Kalyan Jewellers has bettered Tanishq by a little margin in types of engagement by getting more shares and almost identical comments, as you can see in the second image below.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

The content posted on the competitor's page is more interactive than the ones posted on Tanishq's page. An example of which can be seen in the image below. Despite this why the engagement level on the page of Kalyan Jewellers is not as high as on that of Tanishq's (see the second image) is one question that can also be answered by the first image.

If you compare the image with any posted on Tanishq's timeline, you will see a huge difference in the visual appeal of the images. The images used in the updates do not have the emotional appeal that you'll find in images used on Tanishq's wall. That is the main reason behind Tanishq's better engagement rate despite lack of interactivity in its posts.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Tanishq elsewhere in social media

Tanishq has an active YouTube channel with some very good content pieces, and it has also registered its presence on Pinterest where it shares its products on various boards. These are the same images they share on Facebook and twitter. Blog is also mostly used as product announcement and showcase platform, but the story is slightly different for its YouTube channel where it has shared some DIY tips (see the video below) along with its usual TVC, and product videos.

The jewellery brand has also created a series of videos titled "What's not working for you at work?". These videos are supposedly present a snapshot of a typical day in the life of a working woman. You can see an example of one such video below.

The brand also runs a Mia by Tanishq campaign that has taken its own domain. The jewellery brand has used various social media platforms to promote this campaign where it asks women to share their stories about their work, their life. The brand also runs a Mia Woman contests on the above-mentioned platforms to encourage women to share their stories.

Conclusion

Tanishq has decent fan following on social media, but it is more because of its product line than its social media activity. The brand has shown very little imagination in utilizing various platforms to boost engagement. It had based all its activities solely on sharing the product shots. This may work for the brand in the short term, but it is very limiting in the long run. It will add little value to the brand quotient. Tanishq needs to go back to the drawing board and start planning its social media exercise keeping all the various elements and content types in mind. It needs to look at twitter differently than it does now – a briefer copy of Facebook.

Expert View:

While Tanishq has a great product and the same is reflected in the way the audience reacts to the product posts I think it has not leveraged the potential of social media to its maximum. What it is basking in is the glory of its mainline brand building exercise through TV ads and also the good product imagery it uses on social media. It needs to do more than just be a product brochure on social media. It needs to start educating and be a jewellery stylist for the everyday woman. Everyday woman as several of Tanishq’s ranges appeal to women for everyday wear as well.

To men it can use a very interesting take where it showcases the stupid things men say to women and then have to make up through a Tanishq. In effect how Tanishq bails men out of sticky situations and helps them keep their relationship on good terms. This has been their TV route as well and could well be their social strategy.

Overall the lack of use of twitter also points towards the lack of application from the brand to make things interesting via good engaging content. Overall Tanishq as a brand has immense scope to leverage and maximize its social presence if it only adds a dash of creativity to its efforts.

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

Analytics support courtesy: Simplify360