Intuitive ways of Social Media Marketing employed by Indian Software Giants

Summary: Top 15 Software Giants of India were taken up for this case study. As is most obvious, they all have their respective presence on the social media sites and internet. But the question here arises here is this: What exactly is the nature of their presence? Did they just decide to have a presence in the namesakes only? The reality is bound to shock your socks off Challenge: The original challenge was to find out as to how the software giants employed the social media marketing practices and what were the benefits generated by following such practices over the traditional marketing approach. What was considered to be a simple task was indeed not to be taken so casually. When these giants were contacted sometime ago, varied types of responses were encountered. When contacted via their official website, most of the companies didn’t even bother to respond. Those who even bothered to do so just cited their company policy to dodge giving any answers to the research questions. After such a disheartening episode, it was decided that a different approach was in the cards. Now the giants were contacted using the social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter. The results of contacting the giants using this medium generated a whole barrage of interesting discoveries. Some of these are highlighted below:

1. Companies are not much active on any social media sites.
2. On twitter, they don’t even bother to address the queries or grievances.
3. On LinkedIn, all they have is a page and a sleuth of followers and nothing else.
4. The most interesting is Facebook. Some companies even went to the trouble of creating page but have cleverly discarded the post on their wall feature thereby making their pages like and comment specific.
5. The Facebook pages have high number of likes but they don’t have even 5% of talking about this.
6. There were also some pages which didn’t even have messaging feature on them.
7. Most of the social media sites are used for employee engagement only.

Solution: Since, nothing happened on this angle as well which eventually gave birth to a multitude of questions: Why are they even bothering with social media presence? Are they afraid of negative reviews so much? Do they have something to hide? Are they not interested in interacting with customers? The list of questions is endless but that does not prove to be the case where solutions are concerned. Step #1 Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Thus these giants should employ people to be able to address customer queries and grievances. Step #2 They should be more active on social media sites and should also engage with their readers on a regular basis. They should post content on a regular basis and also be prompt with their replies. Step #3 Their Facebook pages should include features such as private messaging and wall posting. They should also be more sensitive to the comments on their posts. Step #4 They should stop citing company policies as their gateway from any question. Results: The companies could reap the following benefits in the long run:

1. Customer loyalty.
2. More customers, i.e., traffic & lead generation.
3. More ease of decision making within the company.
4. Helps in market research.
5. Promptly addressing customer grievances, thus avoiding bad publicity.
6. Makes room for good customer reviews.