Social Media Strategies and Technologies

Exchange4Media and Blogworks have conducted the “India Social Media Survey-2009″ with an aim to capture insights from brands and marketers in India to understand social media landscape. I find this is an useful resource for Indian social media community as it shares social media experiences, case studies & learnings from brands and marketers.

For the benefit of social media marketing community in India, blogworks has released a free digital  version of this report - a must read if you are a marketer or work for brand in India and interested in using social media platforms for business.

Key Insights From The India Social Media Survey - 2009 Report:

• Social media enjoys good credibility among Indian brands and marketers.

• Over 90% believe that social media platforms have impact on business/brands and 85% think that social web influences consumer purchase decisions.

• Just like global trend,  majority of respondents in survey believe that social media will have huge impact on business & marketing in next two years.

• Organizations are realizing the potential of new media platforms and they believe engagement is the key driver for success.

• More than 80% of respondents think that Indian brands and maketers have very minimal or basic understanding of new media platforms.

• Outsourcing social media[marketing] activities is still in infancy stage - only 15% of survey repondents used social media activity outsourcing.

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In India, social networking sites are continued to be the  hot places for people to hang-out on web, while Orkut clearly rocks the  Indian social networking space, it’s adoption is majorly driven by the site popularity among college students(youth segment in Tier-1 & Tier-2 cities across India).

comScore has released a report on Popular social networking sites in India and how global brands are gaining prominence .

Key highlights  of the report:

• Orkut is the most popular social networking site with 3 times bigger userbase than it’s competitor!(facebook).
• Facebook has a long way to go to beat Orkut but it is growing at 150% compared to a year ago. Surprisingly hi5  has grown above 180%.
• BharatStudent.com ranks 3rd in the list of popular social networking sites in India, growing at 88% compared to a year ago.
• Ibibo.com and BigAdda.com are losing their marketing share. I think their initial adoption was majorly driven by the heavy online advertising and offline-marketing.

Top Social Networking Sites in India :

What is your take on the popularity of Orkut in India? and Why Facebook is not penetrating as fast as it did in other regions?.

JuxtConsult has released  “India Online Study Report 2009″ - a snapshot of this report can be accessed from the below slideshare presentation.

Some Key Findings from this report are:

• Total Internet Users are 47 million (39 million urban + 8 million rural).
• 15% user growth in daily internet usage category.
• Top 5 online activities are -  Travel Products Search , Job Search , Non-Travel products search,IM+Chatting and General News.
• Google continues to be the top destination followed by Yahoo!.
• Email (Y!+GMail) is the most used web activity.

You can find various other reports related to Indian Internet user behavior and consumption at Juxt Research.What do you think are core roadblocks for internet penetration in India?.