Companies target social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN for pitching consumers

Legal hassles, poor 3G coverage and patchy broadband haven't stopped the rapid growth of social media across India— both for people at home and for businesses looking to build digital campaigns to reach increasingly networked consumers. 


If Facebook has crossed some 65 million users in India, others such as LinkedIn and Twitter, with more than 15 million and between 10 and 33 million users (depending on whom you ask), respectively, and newer sites such as Pinterest and Quora too have grown sharply in the past 12 months. 

Even as millions of these users log into these sites from their computers, tablets and most visibly from their mobile phones, businesses are graduating from being hesitant adopters of marketing on social media to being full-blown fans of this medium.

From being an absent afterthought on Facebook, brands and companies have today morphed to aggressively targeting social networkers with bespoke plans and initiatives as they seek new avenues for growth. 

Kirthiga Reddy has been watching this social media revolution unfold over the past 30 months as the head of Facebook's India business. From April last year, the world's largest social networking site has seen its India user base explode from around 25 million to over 65 million.

"With such an engaged user base, India is one of the fastest growing countries on Facebook," she says. 

This growth has been fuelled here by a large number of hyper-networked mobile users, who manage to stay logged in, despite patchy internet connectivity. Reddy already sees mobile as the future of social networking. 

"We are a mobile-first company and are constantly working to improve the experience across all devices. Globally, of the over 1 billion Facebook users, more than 600 million access the social networking site on their mobile devices. In fact, Facebook has added 225 million new mobile users in the last 12 months," says Reddy.

According to Rajiv Dingra, CEO of WATConsult, a social media agency, Facebook has added around 10 million users in the past six months alone, while he estimates that LinkedIn, a professional networking sites favoured by corporates, has added some six million users. 

"Social networking sites are looking beyond the initial bunch of users to the next layer," he says. "These are often in small towns and often first-timers." 

As these sites have evolved to become the first port of call for India's youth, brands are tumbling over themselves to build innovative and often digital-only or even digitalfirst campaigns to get noticed. 

However, from creating an unmeasured splash with a Facebook page or Youtube channel, marketers are now getting more precise with their initiatives. 

"Last year there was a (Facebook) fan acquisition craze and that has been replaced by a more measured approach, with actual return on investment being the focus," adds Dingra.