Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Orkut are the top two social networks in India. The interesting element is that most of the social networking activities happen between 6 pm and 10 pm. In other words, Indian online users aren’t using social media during work hours (which is usually an assumed fact). It is a simple but key insight that will significantly boost any social media marketing campaign’s ROI. Here is a list of top Indian Social Networks:

Top 5 Social Network in India

Some worthwhile Statistics to look at:

1) 60% of the social networking traffic come from Non Metro-Cities but the highest traffic generating city still remains to be a Metro i.e. Mumbai

2) The highest number of active users are from the 15-24 age group but LinkedIn has a different age group of active users i.e. 25-34 age-group

3) The male-female ratio shows consistency with the overall population break-up by gender i.e. 80:20 in favor of males

4) Social media in India reaches out to 60 per cent of the online Indian audience

5)Facebook and Orkut, together cater to about 90 per cent of the users in the social media space.

6) Facebook is the only social network in India that has witnessed a tremendous growth, almost doubling its users in the last 6 months.

7) Highest number of active social media audience in India are in the age group of 15-24 and are graduates who are looking for a Job or planning further studies

8 ) The maximum users come from the ‘less than 2 lakhs p.a.’ income category. This is because social networks are primarily driven by the youth

9) More than 45% of the users on Social Networks return during the day. Facebook tops the list with users re-visiting more than 3 times during a day

10) Majority of the time spent by the Indian audience on Facebook is on Interactive Games/Applications and then on viewing Photos

Now that you have gotten a better understanding of the Indian social media landscape, I believe you’re better equip to reach your target audience. After all, conversations is the key when it comes to social media marketing (I’m assuming that your have a great product). Feel free to post your questions under the comments section below. I’ll answer them within my best ability.

Cross Posted via Penn-Olson

The projections too are bright with social media poised to reach 3.1 B$ globally in 5 years and with India already among the top 10 countries visiting twitter and with more than a dozen social media sites on India’s Top 20 one in no way can ignore social media marketing as a critical form of  marketing in todays times.

What needs to be done though is Social Media Marketing needs to be differentiated from other forms of online marketing for it to be well understood by marketers. This post is an attempt at chalking out the key differences..

Social Media VS SEM/Banner Advertising

1. Asset creation VS Renting Of Assets - The first key differentiation is that of creating an asset. Social media media allows you to create an asset be it a twitter account with 100 or so followers or a facebook fanpage with 1000 fans. Its an asset that you can leverage, grow, scale and benefit from as long as you keep investing time in it. SEM i.e. search engine marketing and Banner adds are nothing but space buys or media buys on such engagement oriented assets or content orient assets like a blog or portal.
2. Conversation VS Clicks - While SEM and Banner have the promise of clicks social media has the promise of conversations. I have delved upon this in an earlier post
3. Two way Vs One Way - Social Media was clearly not meant for push marketing or the classical one way dialogue and hence one needs to look to converse rather than push media on social media vis a vis a banner or text ad where the communication is clearly focused on the product.Social media is about understanding the interests of your target audience and then conversing with them on diverse topics

Yes we always have felt and seen for ourselves that deaf clients = bad clients in social media. Infact even deaf people can converse as they can take the help of sign language. So incase a company is deaf by virtue of not understanding how to lissen on social media then it either can hire a sign language instructor ( i.e. social media agency) or learn the ropes by reading about it on the web or take the help of a hearing aid (social media monitoring services).

In short - LISTENING is the most important and always the first aspect of social media. Now one can listen by monitoring existing social platforms or one can listen by creating a social platform that invites users to express themselves.

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