Hi Everyone,

For my Individual Social Media Research Assignment, the company I chose to examine was Mi Singapore and its use of social media. A technology-focused company, Mi Singapore is the Singapore wing of Xiaomi and its aim is to bring high-quality technology to consumers at an affordable price. As the company prides itself on incorporating customer feedback into the product development process, I thought it would be interesting to analyze if Mi Singapore’s use of social media does indeed succeed in engaging and satisfying the needs of Mi fans. Following that, I aimed to explore how the company can better leverage on social media to increase brand loyalty.

To do this, I looked at 4 of Mi Singapore’s current social media platforms – the Mi Community site, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. I found that on the Mi Community page, a platform unique to the company, members had moderate to high engagement with the brand and the platform provided members an avenue to share information and ideas on Xiaomi’s products, participate in contents and share their feedback with fellow users and the company. However, over the month of March where I tracked the site’s activity, I found that there was a low incidence of content creation by members. This did change during the “Mi Fan Festival Singapore”, demonstrating that members were probably not inactive, but were mainly watchers instead of commenters or content creators and needed specific incentives to create content.

Through my examination of Mi Singapore’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages, it was evident that Mi Singapore’s Facebook page has the widest reach out of all the other social media platforms and was also the company’s main platform for product announcements and launches. However, followers did not engage much with the content on these sites and Mi Singapore’s posts on Instagram and Twitter were rather irregular.

Following this analysis, I suggested 2 main strategies for the company to adopt in order to address the issues identified. The first was implementing a ranking system on the Mi Community site, where members could earn badges according to the number of posts they created or commented on within the month. This would act as an incentive for members to create content as it gives them a sense of pride and position within the community. These badges would be displayed together with their username when they posted or commented on the site. The second strategy was to build on the existing #MiExplorer program by engaging social media influencers as participants of the initiative, in addition to their current method of recruiting #MiExplorers.

Just a quick note on the #MiExplorer program, it is a initiative where participants get to try out Xiaomi’s latest products before they launch and post about their experiences with the product. However, recent posts from #MiExplorers have been met by skepticism from some of the fans on the trustworthiness of their review. Therefore, the engagement of social media influencers as part of this campaign would help boost the trustworthiness and increase audience engagement in this initiative.

Overall, Mi Singapore is largely effective in utilising social media to engage and satisfy the needs of Mi fans, however there is room to improve in these aspects and the use of these strategies could not only address these issues, but also increase loyalty to the brand.

Thanks for reading and comment below if you would like to find out more about my research!

Francesca