by Md. Abu Syeed

From early December to February it is generally the season for celebrations and thus a great opportunity to grab the consumers’ top of mind recall. In an industry like telecommunication, cut throat competition is present among the top players in all aspect of their operations. In this article, we want to see how their digital activities are shaping up. We used our unique software (Socialtool) to extract data from the first week of December 2015 to the last day of February 2016. Here, only Facebook is considered.

Fan Base

During this time period 895 Facebook posts were shared by Grameenphone, Banglalink and Robi Axiata. They lured a total that exceeded 1.4 million new fans among them. The aggressive behavior of Robi Axiata paid off as they acquired almost equal no of new fans relative to the market leader Grameenphone (0.55 million). But, Robi Axiata is far from catching Grameenphone in the total number of fans.

Grameemphone leads the pack with about 6.32 million fans and Robi Axiata has about 6.03 million. Banglalink is in the third position with about 5.66 million fans. Grameenphone and Robi Axiata are very close to each other in respect to total number of fans. One poor campaign by Grameenphone can cost the top position (in terms of highest no of fans).

Engagement

A logical question arises, when we talk about fans, and that is how many of the fans are really engaging with the brand online? On the aggregate, the industry generated 22 million engagement through Likes, Comments and Shares. It is clear that Robi has outperformed the market leader in terms of generating more consumer engagement. During this time period, there was a total 9 million Likes, comments and shares which was 2 million higher than Grameenphone. And Banglalink was third with a million less than Grameenphone.

The most engaging post was by Robi with their Biometric Data pack offer posted on February 1^st. The fans engaged with 837000 Likes, 5241 Shares and more 11800 comments. Banglalink’s post of January 23^rd about the achievement of their brand ambassador Shakib Al Hasan was the second most engaging post across the industry. The engagement had a massive 752000 Likes, 3404 shares and more than 3600 comments. On the other hand Grameenphone fans engaged with 279000 Likes with more than 2300 shares and more than 4300 shares with its internet data pack offered on January 24^th.

Community Management

Behind every successful social media page, there is always a community manager team (CM) working at the back end. During this time period we can see that Banglalink’s CM was most active with 389 posts and the least active was Grameenphone’s CM with 206 post. Banglalink’s CM posts were relatively evenly spread throughout this time frame with constant highs and lows while Robi seemed to have followed a pulsing strategy. They had more posts compared to anyone else during the later of December, mid of January and during that final days of February. At the same time Grameenphone was least active but on 28^th of February they equaled the no of posts with Robi.

Performance score

Grameenphone and Robi Axiata have scored 77 each on our rating out of 100 and Banglalink scored 70. It is clear that Robi is directly challenging Grameenphone for the market leadership.

With a relatively higher fan base Grameenphone outperformed the other two competitors in our Fan Base vs Cm posts and activation mapping. Considering a lower fan base robi is better performer in the industry.

With the announcement that Banglalink is going to focus on digital more in the upcoming days, it is already vivid that the digital arena, especially in the social media, things are going to be interesting. It is just a matter of time to find out how the other relevant players react to the probable changed landscape.