Social Media & Insurance Industry in India

The insurance sector in India is built on the two bulwarks of ‘Trust & Reputation.’ These two pillars hold the highest esteem in the eyes of any prospective or current insurance holder. A classic example of the above claim is the market dominance of LIC in the insurance vertical. LIC has been around for more than five decades and being a PSU has been able to garner the trust of Indians over the years. The fact that LIC controls more than 80% of the life insurance market is a testimony to its reliance on the two pillars of success stated above. Fig 1 below gives the share of insurance market between public and private sector insurance companies.

Earlier, the organizations relied on agents or walk-ins for the marketing, selling and distributing their insurance policies. But, with the egression of internet in 1990s and the subsequent advancements in the next decade another very important channel for customer interaction was created. And, today most of the insurance organizations in India have internet presence either through their websites or customer portals and the new star on the horizon is social media.

Social media is defined as the media that is posed by the user and can take many different forms such as forums, message boards, blogs, wikis and podcasts. Some of the social media applications include Google, Facebook and YouTube. The reachability of social media in India is about 60 percent, of the total online audience. This channel has immense potential and in the near future the significance of social media is set to grow at a very strong pace. Some facts on social media that might not be known:

• 60% of the social networking traffic comes from Non Metro-Cities but the highest traffic generating city still remains to be a Metro i.e. Mumbai
• The highest number of active users belong to an age group of 15-24 years, but LinkedIn has active users in the age group of 25-34 years
• Facebook and Orkut, together cater to about 90 per cent of the users in the social media space
• Highest number of active social media audience in India are in the age group of 15-24 and are graduates who are looking for a Job or planning further studies
• Majority of the time spent by the Indian audience on Facebook is on Interactive Games/Applications and then on viewing Photos

The above stated fact supports the idea that social media is mainly youth driven, and it is this strata of the society which requires an awareness on the insurance products and services. Furthermore, the majority of the social media using population consists of graduates who would be willing to buy insurance if educated properly and offered customized services.

Indians generally consider insurance as a means of tax saving instrument, and miss out on the primary importance of insurance which is to provide protection and wealth creation opportunity in the long run. Social media can be used as a platform to remind people repeatedly of the need to be insured rather than waiting for a significant event to occur in their lives. Benefits of using social media by an insurer can be as follows:

• Dramatically decreases the cost of establishing and developing a new brand.
• Changing the customer experience to support channel integration and personalization.
• Increasing effectiveness of recruitment, training and skills development for agents.
• Enhancing operating models with improvements in communication and collaborations.

Fig 2 below gives the health of various organizations in the insurance segment from the FY 2009 to FY 2010 and their associated growth patterns.

Some of the challenges associated with the exploitation of social media by the insurance industry are regulatory and compliant in nature. Other challenges include relevant, interesting and timely content creation to market new and existing offerings. Social media strategy, then, is a balance of regulatory compliance and brand management. Indian insurance companies haven’t till date harnessed the power of social media to acquire new customers, service existing ones and create life-long loyalty through personalized and innovative offerings. The time when insurance companies who are not active and engaged on social platforms will be outperformed by their competitors is not too far.

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