40% of conversations in a community is linked to brands: Tamanna Dhamija, Convosight

Dhamija, Founder & CEO of Convosight, spoke at the Pitch CMO Summit, expounding upon the importance of tapping into online communities for insights

by Team PITCH
Published - March 28, 2023
4 minutes To Read
40% of conversations in a community is linked to brands: Tamanna Dhamija, Convosight

End of Broadcasting will be the beginning of conversations, said Tamanna Dhamija, Founder & CEO of Convosight, while speaking at PITCH CMO Summit.

Dhamija shared that she realized the power of online communities when she saw that 40% of conversations there are linked to brands. “I couldn't believe how simple and scalable this phenomenon was if brands had the opportunity to tap into communities such as these online and talk to consumers about the efficacy of brands. It took me three years to get to this realization.” 

In her presentation at the event, she talked about one such community- Jhatpat Recipe which has around five lakh members. She said there are 1000s of such communities just talking about food and other topics and there are 63 million members in these rooms spread across the internet.

According to Dhamija, communities have always existed but now they have arrived online, where people are talking to each other. "For instance,  Facebook groups are the largest with 1.8 billion people in these rooms. They've all joined organically and again, people are talking to each other. It's not just broadcasting. Other platforms are Reddit, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord. These are all the channels on existing social media where communities are present," she noted. 

“We've already witnessed this evolution of broadcasting to conversations. It's a tectonic shift in the way we as consumers have started behaving online. We have seen that balconies are where we step online, where a brand or an influencer or a consumer creates the balcony and constantly consumes a lot of content from other balconies," she said. (Balconies are here refer to Facebook pages, Twitter, Moj whereas Halls are Facebook Group, Reddit and Whatsapp ) 

Dhamija shared that since consumers moved to balconies, brands have also followed: “So all of the listening, inciting and paid marketing happen on these balconies. And as we all have evolved, as we all have started trusting each other digitally, we've seen an explosion of halls. And what are halls again? Channels in which people are talking to each other and not just broadcasting.” 

When we look at balconies and halls, there are just a few differences. First, all balconies are created through paid marketing. “So there's the concept of having a lot of followers and we do paid marketing to garner followers, in balconies or in halls, which are built organically. It's all organic because it's based on interest or passion. When we look at engagement between balconies and halls, there is a stark difference. Where you see the engagement in balconies is on an average 10% but when we look at halls one person on average engages six times in a hall which is 600% engagement. Content is created through individuals like you and me and that's how influence is created in a hall.” 

She further shared that not just organic communities, but even brand own communities or Facebook groups have really high metrics. She cited an example of Sunsilk Facebook group, which has just 20,000 members, but the organic reach of the group is 2.2 million.

“We knew communities need to be an integral part of the marketing and insights mix because it's an integral part of the consumer buying journey.”

She also stated that brands have not adopted communities at all and the main reason behind this is that there are no listing or discovery tools that exist that help brands identify the relevant rooms online that they can tap into. 

And there Convosight came into the picture. “That's how Convosight came into existence. It is just an enabler. It's really the change in behaviour that has happened online that has given the rise of communities.” 

She further added, “We were there at the right time and saw this opportunity and now we aggregate communities on existing social channels, really creating opportunities for brands and consumers in communities to co-exist. It's a win-win.” 

She also said, “It drives massive value to the consumer because they are there talking about the brands and categories. It creates consideration through word of mouth. We now have access to 100,000 communities with 900 million members across the globe. And we work with about 150 consumer brands, very large enterprise customers, again, enabling discovery, enabling inciting and marketing into those communities.”

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