Decoding: Pillars of Flipkart Social Media Strategy

The brand noticeably leverages celebrity power, highlights products and makes use of bright creatives as part of the Flipkart social media strategy. Social Samosa attempts to understand the e-commerce player's digital marketing game.

Over the last decade, Flipkart has made its presence felt with several high recall campaigns. They have roped in the likes of Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt as well as brought forth narratives where kids behaved like adults (kidults). Founded in Bengaluru, this e-commerce giant has grown manifold since 2007. Last year, they forayed into original content with Flipkart Video. Social media has been an important part of the Flipkart journey, we take a look at the constituents of the Flipkart social media strategy.

Flipkart Social Media Strategy

Flipkart enjoys a significant social media footprint, duly fuelled by the celebrity influencers they rope in from time to time, in addition to their roster of brand ambassadors. They often run campaigns for specific sales, occasions and brands. The brand showcases products, highlights the causes they support and puts up engaging illustrations from time to time on social media platforms. They also have a strong ORM presence on Twitter (with Flipkart Support) and Facebook comments.

Facebook: 9.3M followers
Twitter: 2.4M followers (Flipkart Support: 137.8K followers)
Instagram: 1.6M followers

Flipkart witnesses significantly more traction in comments than for their posts on Facebook indicates Talkwalker data. The trend can be attributed to the fact that a lot of consumers share their woes in the comment section and are reverted to by the brand's ORM team.

As for any e-commerce brand, Twitter is an important social media platform when it comes to tracking conversations and sentiments. Flipkart has two main accounts on Twitter. They are Flipkart, the brand's main promotional account, and Flipkart Support, the account that replies to all queries and complaints. As per the data collected by Talkwalker, they both share almost an equal share of voice.

Talkwalker data indicates that a major spike in engagement was seen for Flipkart around the time actor Salman Khan posted a video endorsing a product available on the platform.

Flipkart Support directly engages with consumers and is much more textually conversational. However, it's engagement numbers are much less as the target audience of the communication is specific, mostly one person at a time.

While Flipkart's main account gets the most engagement for pictures and videos, textual communication is more popular for Flipkart Support. Links work better for the support account (presumably because they are necessary for the persons to engage with in order to get their complaint addressed) than the main account where users may not want to leave the platform to pursue the communication further.

In the case of Flipkart Support, activity by the account and the audience is nearly perfectly proportional, arguably because of the conversational nature of the conversations the account partakes in.

According to the Talkwalker data, replies seem to the most popular method of engagement for Flipkart Support. They get comparatively lesser mentions and retweets seem to the least favourable method to engage.

The top three influencers associated with Flipkart are Salman Khan, Varun Dhawan and Guru Randhawa. Among them, Varun Dhawan is the one in regards to whom the sentiment of the conversations is mostly positive.

Also Read: Decoding: Johnson’s Baby India Social Media Strategy

Twitter strategy

Though a large part of the communication is the same across social media platforms, Flipkart often puts up content on Twitter that's specific to the platform and wouldn't make much sense on any other platform. In two recent instances, they participated in the conversation around #SareeTwitter and used the platform interface (reply, retweet, heart) as the base of their creative.

They also reply to other brands, participating in campaigns. Recently, they did so with Lay's India, acknowledging #Heartwork.

With Flipkart Support, they address complaints and other queries. Most of these are about delivery issues.

Star power

There are two prominent ways Flipkart leverages star power. One, they often put pictures of celebrities who are directly associated with them, like Ranbir and Alia. Two, they create content around well-known personalities such as wishing boxer Mary Kom on her birthday.

Product's the hero

Products are sewn into the social media presence of Flipkart in two ways: a post that subtly talks about a category of products and those that are direct advertisements of a product. While communication is obvious in the latter category, the former is where they create engaging content.

Original content

Since last year, Flipkart has been promoting its original video content offerings. Under lockdown, the instances have arguably increased as their main delivery operations have been hit due to the restrictions. Latest shows available on the app include: Fake or Not? With Mallika Dua and Super Fan.

On Instagram Live, the brand has been running a series under #FlipkartBrightSide where they feature artists such as Kenny Sebastian, Urooj Ashfaq, Kumar Varun and Rohan Joshi.

Games and engagement

Another strategy deployed by Flipkart to keep people hooked on the app even when they can't or don't want to shop is to offer them games and engaging experiences. Recently, they have been promoting a cricket game (because the summer season is synonymous with the sport) and DIY artwork options (as people are stuck at home with plenty of time to experiment and create new things).

Supporting causes

While dealing with COVID-19 and its consequences, Flipkart has been sharing positive stories of impact under #FlipkartBrightSide. With such communication, they put forth the brand as one that cares about the people beyond selling them products. This is not exactly something new as Flipkart has, on previous occasions, shared details about causes they are involved in and how people can help. One such example was the tie-up with Nanhi Kali on Women's Day.

Special days

The brand acknowledges important days as per the social media calendar and participates in related conversations. These could be the days of national importance such as the Independence Day or one with a more universal appeal, such as Mother's Day. These posts are not meant to drive people to use the platform to shop but work as a gentle nudge in regards to brand recall if they are planning to shop at the last minute.

Campaigns galore

Flipkart does a plethora of campaigns. While some are directly linked to an upcoming or ongoing sale (No Kidding Days and Big Billion Days), others are category/brand building exercises on social media (Flipkart Fashion Capital Dictionary and Choose Your Age). Both instances help them build and shape the brand in sync with the core persona of an e-commerce platform with a variety of products and brands on offer.

Brand of brands

Being an e-commerce platform, Flipkart as a brand deals with a lot of brands. Some of these brands, according to commercial deals (assumably) and topical trends (such as Games of Thrones Monology Game), make it to their social media presence as creatives.

Flipkart Social Media Strategy majorly leverages the power of celebrities. That's one of the most noticeable things upon scrolling their pages. They highlight products as well as use bright creatives to keep up the engagement online. Being a platform that offers an offline service, a major part of this engagement are complaints, which they take care of with the help of ORM tools and team.