Zoozoos: The new No. 1 on Facebook

The Vodafone Zoozoo page has become the biggest assembly of Indian fans among brands, hitting 14 million over the weekend. And it is still growing rapidly.

There is a change in leadership. The Vodafone Zoozoo brand page on Facebook (facebook.com/zoozoo) has overtaken long-time leader Tata Docomo to become the most popular brand page among Indians. With 14 million fans, it leads Tata Docomo by about half a million fans. These are the only two brand pages in the country that have topped the magic fan figure of 10 million (http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/india).

The Zoozoos, a truly extraordinary phenomenon in Indian advertising, are actually quite young, having been unveiled in the second season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) in the summer of 2009. They are a creation of Rajiv Rao of Ogilvy, the agency on the Vodafone account.

In the year that they came to life, the little egg-like creatures managed to gather only 3.5 lakh fans on Facebook. Over the following year, they added only a lakh fans, adding up to less than half a million.

The numbers have been growing especially quickly in recent months. The page got to 10 million fans only in April, 2013. It has added about four million fans in less than three months - or about 50,000 new fans every day!

In fact, going by Google Trends, search interest in the Zoozoos reached its peak in May 2009. Relative to that month (May 2009 = 100), interest had dropped to 18 by July. The highest interest it has garnered since then has been a score of 15 in May this year during IPL when Zoozoo-themed advertising was at its peak.

So how did Vodafone manage to add so many fans when online interest in the Zoozoos has declined? Clearly it has to do with substantial investment in advertising to get the 'likes'. Additionally, the company is spending money in creating interesting content that has people returning to the page.

This probably explains why the number of fans 'talking' about the page is fairly high ('talking' is a measure of engagement and includes any fan who has either commented on or shared a page in the last seven days). So, it is not enough to have many fans; a brand should be able to engage them. Tata Docomo is often held up as an example of a brand that created a huge fan base but couldn't keep their interest. For example, this weekend the Zoozoo page had about 5.4 lakh fans talking as opposed to only 2.1 lakh for Tata Docomo. According to the site www.socialbakers.com, the Average Engagement Rate for the Zoozoo page was about six times higher than for Tata Docomo.

Though the appeal of the Zoozoos began in the metros, according to Vodafone their popularity has grown amongst consumers in Tier II and Tier III towns and that's where many of the fans come from. This may also be a function of the spread of both the internet as well as Facebook's popularity in smaller metros and towns.

Dual Tone

The brand uses social media in two ways. It has a standalone Vodafone brand page on Facebook (facebook.com/VodafoneIN), apart from operating the Zoozoo page. On Twitter however, the brand has a single page with more than 89,000 followers (twitter.com/VodafoneIN), where the brand claims to solve or address around 8,000 Twitter complaints every month. Why there isn't a Zoozoo account on Twitter is, however, unclear.

The Vodafone India page is a corporate presence on Facebook. That's the place for all company-related news, updates and offers. It's primarily used to interact with customers for their queries and to let them be in touch with Vodafone India as a company.

The Zoozoo page started off as a brand community page and has been popular since inception. During the first wave of Zoozoo advertising, Vodafone had set up the page as a primary destination for fans to access exclusive Zoozoo stories and content.

"The Zoozoo page and its content are largely responsible for it gaining such a huge fan following. It's not easy to maintain two different pages, especially when the Vodafone brand page also has more than 600,000 fans," says a social media expert who was earlier associated with the Zoozoo online effort.

Anuradha Aggarwal, senior vice-president, brand communications and insights, Vodafone India, could not be contacted because she was travelling. However, in an earlier interview with afaqs!, she had said that the company has a dedicated online team pro-actively monitoring customer complaints and audience behaviour on social media.

Last year, a hashtag, #BetterThanVodafoneService, was trending on Twitter and a lot of people started tweeting using it. Aggarwal stated that in any such a crisis, the brand seeks to identify the root cause of the problem and move quickly to resolve that.

Last year when the page managers saw fans wishing each other Happy Diwali on each post on the Zoozoo Facebook page, Vodafone's social media team moved fast to create Zoozoo Diwali eCards. This was then extended to an interactive Zoozoo carols app which allowed fans to create their own Zoozoo-esque melodies to use as greetings at Christmas. The brand saw 60,000 melodies being created by users in just two weeks.

Beyond the numbers:

It is common to hear digital experts say in conferences that India hasn't produced many great digital case studies. The head of a digital agency interviewed thinks the Zoozoo effort on Facebook qualifies as one for the way it has leveraged the interest created by TV advertising. He is impressed by the engagement because "fans have started using the Zoozoo characters to create original images which they are uploading on the brand page and thus spreading the word." Vodafone had recently announced its decision to launch Zoozoo goodies such as toys, mugs, key chains, T-shirts and the like.

The Zoozoo page is also a powerful conduit to send users to the Vodafone corporate page when the need arises.

Since inception, Zoozoos have served Vodafone as effective brand mascots carrying its marketing messages with ease and grandeur, irrespective of the medium. Now that they have become a remarkable force here as well, it will be interesting to see how the company leverages the popularity of the Zoozoos further online.