Exclusive | Leveraging Twitter with '#18ThingsIWant': Homeshop18's Narasimha Jayakumar

Let’s rewind our calendars! Let’s go back to 8th August 2012. All the “Twitter savvy” readers would have guessed it! HomeShop18’s ‘#18ThingsIWant’ created a buzz all over Twitter! 

 

The campaign, created by Mind Shift Interactive, was a contest on Twitter to promote Chetan Bhagat's new book, ‘What Young India Wants’ on Homeshop18. The hashtag was created on 8th Aug on Twitter asking the consumers to share 18 Things they want in life and all conversations of the consumers revolved around websites, shopping, mobiles, romance etc. 

 

To know more about that and a little more about Homeshop18’s strategies, Adgully caught up with Narasimha Jayakumar, COO –  Ecommerce, HomeShop18.com. 

 

Giving an understanding, from the brand’s perspective, of how they used twitter, he said, “Twitter is a very energetic social platform. We need to engage very quickly with our followers as their tweets would go viral. Secondly, Twitter seems to be a topical platform too.” 

 

He says, “Taking the number 18 which has been closely connected to our brand we came up with ‘#18ThingsIWant’ and created a hashtag on 8th Aug. Also number 18 signifies the ‘youth’. The idea was to ask people 18 things they want in life obviously around shopping.” 

 

As told by Jayakumar, the results were amazing. Within an hour’s time a lot of conversation started and the campaign did pretty well in all the cities in a very short span of time. Cumulative reach of over 1.6 million, over 1.3 million mentions and over 3 lakhs RTs, which sounds amazing! 

 

“Our target audience is also very young and trendy in terms of fashion etc. So this whole idea worked around really well! The hashtag created a strong brand connect with the target audience,” Jayakumar added. 

 

The social media strategy behind the whole initiative was firstly, to build a strong connect with their fans, which of-course they did and secondly, it is an innovative way of reaching out to their customers and creating an awareness among them about the already existing products and off course the add-ons too. Adding to this statement, he said, “in this way we reached out a larger number of audiences as compared to other promotional steps.” So basically if we look at the whole initiative, it is a 360 degree strategy focusing on communication, marketing, and promotion and also addressing customer feedback! 

 

Homeshop18 has been doing a lot around the social platforms, Facebook and Twitter especially and Jayakumar told us that Twitter and Facebook would be used in all sorts for future as well. Also adding some more to their social media strategies, Jayakumar told us that to make social media more engaging, as Homeshop18 is an online e-commerce portal, people would want to know how a particular dress or accessory would look after wearing, so they actually do a proper model product shoot and upload on YouTube. Also to add to this when the customer clicks on the promotional video Homeshop18’s page with that particular product opens and the customer can easily buy it! He says, “Homeshop18 is the first e-commerce company that uses YouTube to this extent. We have over 2 million views on YouTube. We would also focus a lot towards this direction in the coming future.” 

 

Also interestingly, they have a separate team just for operating the social media platforms, who work addressing queries etc twenty four hours! The hashtag trended worldwide at No.3 position first and very soon moved to the No. 1 position. With 24:1 positive negative ratio and over 3 lakhs re-tweets and +2 million outreach by end of day, ‘#18ThingsIWant’ stirred the audience!