Indian Internet Users And Social Media Trends

by Veena V Krishnan

The idea of using Internet itself is not a very old concept in India, let alone the Social Networking trends.  Social media websites have become a global phenomenon and millions go online to engage in social networks now. According to Wikipedia, there are some 1.5 billion members worldwide. When we talk about Indian Internet users stats, there are around 49 million users, out of which 40 million are from the urban areas. 35 million people access Internet regularly, a clean 19 percent jump from last year. It is estimated that on an average in India, 25 million people access Internet every day. Let’s sneak a quick look at the key functions of Internet for Indian users. They are:

• Information/ research
• Marketing
• Work
• Communication
• Acquiring outsourced projects
• News updates
• E Commerce
• Career opportunities and finally
• Dating
• Networking

In India many social network sites are attracting an increasing number of members. The biggest social network in India is Orkut (Google) with 15 million visitors (40% of Indian internet users) and a total of 67 Million worldwide. The average visit frequency of Indian members is 10 times per month.

But only 1.5 million out of a billion Indians are members of Facebook. Interestingly, statistics also state that only 285,656 of these are below 18 years of age.

Of late, Indian internet users have the tendency to be hooked to social network sites that are simple and easy to use. The popularity of Orkut became the very reason for the Social Networking Cultural Revolution in India as we see it now. Most school going teens have an account on Orkut and are networked throughout their friend and family circles. There are already dozens of local Indian social networking sites vying to be as accepted as Orkut in the country and the popular ones among them are Rediff.com, Yaari, Hi5 and many more.

The usage pattern of Indian internet users with regard to Social Media is quite interesting. For ex: Twitter has achieved tremendous growth in the last few months and recent polls suggest what Indians are using Twitter for. Indian Internet Users use it as a News Service primarily (16%) while majority (17%) of users are still figuring out what to do with Twitter. Another 11% prefers to stay in touch with Friends using Twitter, 11% enjoy updating their status and 10% uses Twitter for Research. The networking or meeting new people online aspect is kind of treated as shallow mindedness in the country and this reflects everywhere on social media sites.

However, India also shows a lot of interest in the Job networking giant LinkedIn, which has a whopping 3 million Indian member base.

The Rise of Social Networking Sites in India

1. First entrant conquers: Whichever website that tried to make the first entry to the country has successfully conquered the people here. They can make good benefits of the curiosity and intrigue of the citizens. Clearly, Orkut had this advantage and has swept away the major lot of fan base. Now slowly things are becoming easier for other networking sites as well.
2. Socio-Cultural factors: Social networking sites have been great for catching up with long lost friends from high school or your local community. While dating is quite common, in India sometimes it happens in subtle ways. Most users seem to shy away from exclusive dating sites like yahoo personal. There is however one exception. Sites like Shaadi.com, Bharatmatrimony.com and others aiming to target the matrimonial market are doing extremely well.
3. Business networking: From LinkedIn stats, it looks like it is gaining new grounds in Indian market.
4. Niche sites: Perhaps the next gen social networking sites that aim specifically at verticals: Games, Cooking, Finance, Religion etc. can easily make it to the top sites in India just by a little push from its marketing front. Flickr is a great example for this. There are a number of Indian photography enthusiasts who are sharing their pictures and participating on Flickr.
5. 5. Online video and music sites are also doing reasonably well. However, one of the major competitors – the Indian Television and Cinema industry still has a grasp on a big share of the user attention.

The major barriers to Internet Usage in India could be the following:

1. The lack of local language content, especially for the common mass.
2. Indian marketers need to focus on making themselves comfortable in using social web tools and educate their bosses, clients and decision makers on benefits of using online media as a new participation platform.
3. Businesses: The social web is a great platform for individuals, businesses and society. We discuss about companies or brands across world using social web channels for customer service, online branding, as marketing, PR and communication tool. But Indian businesses haven’t shown a great preference towards this. A good example for this could be the comparison of usage of Social Networking sites by various business owners in the West and their Indian counterparts. In India, the mainstream business tycoons and small/medium company owners and officials don’t bother about having accounts in any such sites and ignore the profits of a good networking in different industries. Whereas in the West you have almost every small, medium, and large organization listed in Social Media sites. People read about them, rate them and pass reviews back and forth. This could be changing fates for the companies that strive hard to be heard. The main reason for the sluggish pace of the popularity of social Media among Indian businesses could be the stats on Internet users from India isn’t as encouraging as it is in the west. They think their target consumers aren’t their yet or very few people in India use online media so it’s not worth spending resources to create a brand online communications.

But slowly this psyche is changing and people have started realising the influence of Online Marketing & PR through various Social Media sites. It won’t be long when Indians become as open to Social networking websites as they have been to any other technology helpful for mankind.