Social Media Strategy Review: Amul

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.

When Verghese Kurien "Father of the White Revolution" reluctantly took the job at the Government of India's experimental creamery at Anand, Gujarat very little he knew that he will end up giving birth to Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) and the brand Amul. Nor did he know that his contribution will give him the honor of being the "Milkman of India".

The brand Amul has since then travelled far and wide breaking traversing across many boundaries, and creating and breaking many records. One such boundary that Amul traversed across and made a new mark is marketing communication. The brand has created a new standard in marketing communication. Has it done the same with the social media, the new platform to engage audience? How Amul fares on this frontier is what I am going to study in this article.

Audience Analysis of Amul

Amul the brand is consumed by all and loved by all, and the same holds true for its marketing communication effort. The love for Amul's advertisements, in particular, and the brand, in general is such that people from all age groups connect emotionally with the brand (see the first image), though the fan page is skewed towards male audience (see the second image), and not everyone talks positive about the brand.

Amul got a good deal of negativity going on social media, but the good thing is its audience is vocal and not reticent. They express their feeling, which gives the brand an opportunity to fix things that are wrong with it (see the third image).

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Overall Strategy

Brand building and creating, nurturing, maintaining, and reinforcing brand awareness appears to the main objective of Amul's social media participation. Through Social media, Amul strives to reinforce the top-of-mind brand recall by following the content-path set and led by Amul Butter, a subsidiary brand of Amul India.

The brand has also started to try influencing the product-usage scenarios/occasions (see the image below) to benefit from increased consumption in the category.

Amul on Facebook

Amul already had a winning content tool that its brand Amul Butter usage in print and outdoors, and at times on web, so it was not very difficult for the brand to take the content leap on Facebook. The brand has simply appropriated the content it has been created for its butter.

Following in its butter's footstep, the brand has become a canvas on which major news items that affect people at large is talked about (see the first two images below). This has led to a significant boost in the level of engagement for each post (see the third image).

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

In total, the brand has over 10-lakh fans, of which a little above 27,000 is actively engaged with the page, a number which keep on going up and falling down, and at times it has gone very low (see the image below). Even when the brand has dropped in engagement, the overall picture is not bleak. If you compare pages from India which had 10 lakhs or more fans, you will see that per fan engagement of the brand is much higher than the rest (see the second image below).

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

But the brand needs to work on its product range, as sentiment expressed on Facebook has a good deal of negativity. 48.23$ of them have negative inclination (see the image below).

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Amul on Twitter

On twitter, the brand has almost replicated the content plan it had followed on Facebook (see the image below). There is very little on this platform which is different from the things there on Facebook. Still it has 12,962 followers, which surpasses the follower base of many Indian brands.

There had been occasions where people have engaged with the brand. It was especially in times of high-energy events (like in the first image). And like on Facebook, here also you can hear the voice of dissent from its followers, which had been duly taken care of by the social media team of Amul (see the second image), unlike some of the brands in India.

It reminds me of my experience with Amazon India, which deleted my negative post which I made when I didn't receive my book even after 22 days of placing the order. It is good to see that Amul is not walking down that path.

One thing which is largely missing in Amul's twitter timeline is use of twitter tools like hashtags, RT, mention, etc.

Comparison with competitor

Although Mother Dairy, which is another big name in the industry, is Amul's closest home-grown competitor, it has not succeeded in reaching out to so many people as did the brand from Anand. One reason behind this could be Mother Dairy's limited pan-India availability.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Amul has also surpassed its competitor in the engagement rate, though the engagement level on Mother Dairy's page had been more or less consistent (as you can see in the image below). The content posted on Mother Dairy's page is quite engaging. If it had not been pitched against Amul, the brand would have looked quite solid in the analysis, but seeing the level of engagement the studied brand enjoys, efforts of Mother Dairy look ordinary (see the second and third images).

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Amul has also outplayed Mother Dairy on the average response per post front by a huge margin, as you can see in the image below. And thanks to its fun quotient (no wonder cats are so famous on the web), Amul's posts have been shared more than the competitor's, but it lagged behind in comments (see the second image below).

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Conclusion

Amul had a very potent tool, but it didn't fully capitalize on it. In fact, the brand should take cue from Oreo India, which building on the concept pioneered by Amul butter created such engaging content pieces. The brand should also study its competitor's content pieces (particularly Mother Dairy's) and bring some variety in the content before monotony sets in and engagement level dips lower, as it has done so quite a few times in the past month (see the fourth image under Amul on Facebook heading). The brand also needs to work on using hashtags and other twitter and Facebook elements.

Analytics support courtesy: Simplify360