Social Media Strategy Review: Zee Cinema

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.

Zee Cinema is one of the most popular Bollywood movie channels in India. The channel is part of the Zee Entertainment Enterprises media group, and is present on most social media platforms; Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Youtube.

Audience Analysis

Zee Cinema has 70.37% male followers and 29.63% females. Between 13-20 years and 21-30 years, the channel has the most number of followers at 32.08% and 33.96%.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Zee Cinema on Facebook

Zee Cinema has a fan following of over 4,23,000 and a very minuscule growth rate of 1.6%. The channel makes an average of 8-9 posts a day. However, it hardly engages with its fans through comments or replies, with the posts receiving maximum likes and not too many shares or comments.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

The content is focused largely on Bollywood. It ranges from birthday wishes for stars, trivia, upcoming telecasts and even movies that are under production. It is more about the general spirit of Bollywood rather than the movies that are being broadcast on the channel.

All posts are accompanied by a photo but not all of these pictures are branded by the channel. Creatives such as the cover photo were branded but only with the Facebook address. There was no incorporation of Twitter or the channel’s main website.

It appeared that the admin liked to create engagement posts on Friday with respect to what new release people planned to watch.

The page allowed users to post until the mid of March but all of these posts were removed. The admin then removed the option of posting on the page timeline, which is an extremely negative step in terms of engagement. Even when people comment on posts made by the admin, there is no response from the admin’s end.

The number of people talking about the brand has been falling continuously due to the fact that there are now lesser mediums for the users to engage with the brand.

A lot of content celebrated “100 years of Cinema” on the page. The page shared a couple of about 30 second long video tributes for several Bollywood legends. The fact that the celebration of cinema was executed in an organised yet interesting fashion with original content is a plus for the page. The 100 years of cinema campaign was also backed by creatives for these legends as well.

A lot of cross-platform promotion is seen on the page with the promotion of a contest that the brand organized on Twitter also being seen on the page.

The channel ran a campaign around “South ka Super Punch”, a series of South Indian movies to be broadcasted on the channel. As an attempt at being humorous, the channel came up with various reasons to “Get hit by South ka Super Punch.” The success or the response was not as satisfying as expected, precisely because the reasons weren’t always funny or striking.

One post in particular grabbed my attention, where the bid was to promote the notion of digitisation. Now that is looking at your own profit as well as creating a wider awareness.

As mentioned earlier, the brand works with a special emphasis by cross linking the platforms. While this is apparent in the post style, the page also uses applications for integration between the various social media platforms. Tabs have links to the Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube accounts for the brand.

During the duration of the analysis, no contest was conducted by the channel on Facebook. There are contests on Twitter, but the Facebook page of the brand was seen to be ignored for such activities.

Zee Cinema on Twitter

With a small community size of 5,000 followers, the channel is growing at a rate of 14.2%. The tweets mostly get a reply and a retweet among people who interact with the channel on Twitter.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Like all other movie channels, trivia, birthday wishes and the essence of cinema dominate the channel’s Twitter strategy as well. Movies that are under production, post-production and the ones that are to be released are also given special significance by the handle.

There is emphasis on publicizing movies that are about to be broadcast or those which are being telecasted at a certain moment. The use of #NowShowing hence is a simple yet effective tool. However, the problem is the frequency of the tweets, which goes up to only about 6 tweets a day on an average, which is extremely unimpressive.

Content sharing across Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest becomes apparent with similar posts (such as #RareClicks) going on all platforms.

The channel ran a #TweetASong contest which, according to the service that the brand is offering, was actually a good idea. However, the minus point in this contest was that the brand itself didn't retweet the user tweets. They ought to have done this at least for the winning tweets.

Zee Cinema on Pinterest

The best thing about Zee Cinema’s Pinterest strategy is the original content that the brand has created. While posters and movie shots are worthy content, they are nothing new. Zee Cinema actually made the effort to create content that was relatable for Bollywood fanatics, as well as different. However, none of this “original content” was posted during the duration of the analysis.

Some key observations:

• The 100 years of Cinema campaign extends to Pinterest as well.
• The only board that was updated was the rare clicks boards.
• Another huge flaw was the ignorance of the channel about the programmes aired. The brand is not promoting the product on the platform as of now.

The channel has interesting ideas but it appears that they have been abandoned. Pinterest can thrive if they keep posting stuff such as Villain Tips and Comic Strips. But unfortunately that is not happening as of now. If the content matches movies scheduled for broadcast, the strategy can be made better.

Zee Cinema on YouTube

The channel is high on content with 34 videos having been uploaded during the duration of the analysis. A series was rendered as the celebration of 100 years of Indian Cinema with 1 minute trivia and fact files about a few legends of the Bollywood industry.

Other videos include promotion for the channel’s South Ka Super Punch and promos for movies that are slated for broadcast on the channel. Out of all the videos uploaded, South ka Super Punch received the best response with over 60,000 views and a fairly decent number of comments.

A channel description is missing.

Though the 100 years of cinema interactive videos is a great idea, they have not been named properly and hence will never show up in the search. e.g. “100 YEAR OF CINEMA SHAH RUKH KHAN”. That is wasting some really good content.

Comparison with Competitor

UTV Action has a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. The last post on Facebook was in January whereas the last Video on YouTube was uploaded 2 years ago and so was the last tweet. The fact that the channel is ignoring social media so blatantly is extremely surprising when even their domain name www.utvaction.in also redirects to their Facebook page.

If taken a look at earlier activity on these platforms, it showed a steady graph. Hence, the ignorance and lack of activity is certainly surprising and needs a boost as soon as possible.

Though UTV Action has more fans than Zee Cinema, these are worthless since no conversation is being initiated by the channel.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Conclusion

The fact that the channel works on creating original content for promotion is good strategy, but shutting the user down? Not so much. Since there is no two-way communication between the brand and the public, we are put in a dilemma as to what criteria to use to rank the engagement and interaction.

On other grounds, posting trivia and interesting videos is one thing, but finally you have a product to promote and that doesn't happen on most levels on the page. Perhaps, the only reason for this could be the fact that even in the offline world, the channel does not have much to offer.

Even when there is, as in the case of the Heroine World TV Premiere and the South Ka Super Punch, attempts are made but in vain. They need to rethink their marketing here, and maybe use their video in a refined manner and continue to use it.

Expert View

Zee Cinema has a very impressive strategy when it comes to original content creation. Original content is very much needed to engage consumers but also to scale one’s social media strategy. What it needs to do, is to improve its strategy and engagement on Twitter. It needs to take that to the next level with better engagement and real time updates.

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

Analytics support courtesy: Simplify360