Case Study: Indiamart uses social media to connect with SMEs

Name of Business: IndiaMART

Website URL: http://www.indiamart.com/

Industry: B2B Marketplace

Target Audience: Bulk buyers, bulk suppliers, manufacturers, exporters, service providers, SMEs and MSMEs

Category of Business

IndiaMART.com is India's largest online B2B marketplace. The platform is aimed at connecting buyers with suppliers. Through this platform, Indian businesses can hope to gain global exposure and conduct business with companies across the world. There are more than 1,000,000 companies that have profiles on the website. IndiaMART.com aims at providing its members cost-effective solutions for business promotion. The site offers its members options like premium listings, portal sponsorships and banner advertising to enhance their online visibility.

Marketing Efforts

IndiaMART.com has great confidence in the power of social media marketing as a medium of reaching out to the target market. It has a presence on various social networking sites.

The company began using Facebook in 2009. The company sees Facebook as a “consistent medium of brand promotion.” IndiaMART.com uses its Facebook account to provide SMEs specific latest news and information about current trends. It does this through regular updates on its wall. Through this medium, the company is able to share information about various business aspects, such as trade shows, with its members.

IndiaMART.com has a meager presence on Twitter. Its Twitter account has less than 500 followers. A restricting factor could be that most of the tweets are promotional, rather than what social networking is actually about, i.e. being social.

IndiaMART.com also uses Youtube to share videos of their media coverage, including interviews of their CEO, as well as success stories of their clients. The company uses Photbucket and Flickr to share pictures of their products and events. Blogger has been used to educate SMEs (small and medium enterprises) on how to better handle their business operations, share key announcements from IndiaMART.com and related news. IndiaMART.com also has a presence on social bookmarking sites like delicious and Stumbleupon.

“Social media marketing has become a very strong medium to reach out to a wider audience. Social media platforms in the form of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube have made it possible to broadcast messages and news to a larger base of business persons and the like. Its ability to engage with the stakeholders irrespective of geographical barriers has helped us penetrate SME space to a large extent,” says Dinesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO, IndiaMART.com.

Result of Efforts

IndiaMART.com has 58,351 fans on Facebook. Many of their fans are very active and freely exchange their thoughts, suggestions and opinions here. IndiaMART.com and other marketplaces generate more than 40 million page views per month. IndiaMART.com’s three-month Alexa global traffic rank is 1,391. Its Indian traffic rank is 108.