Comscore.com, the world’s largest digital metrics site, in a study released in July 2010 states that more than 33 million Indians — which is roughly 84% of the country’s total internet audience — visited social networking sites in July this year.
This makes India the seventh largest market worldwide for social networking, after the U.S., China, Germany, Russian Federation, Brazil and the U.K.
The study makes one more important point: Between July 2009 and July 2010, the total Indian social networking audience grew 43 percent.
If you as a corporate professional had not noticed this tectonic shift in the use of Internet you should do so now.
You must look at how the traffic to social networking sites in India has grown in the last one year:
1. The unique user base of Facebook.com soared from 7.47 million in July 2009 to 20.87 million in July 2010 – a stunning growth of 179%.
2. Twitter saw the number of unique users from India leapfrog from 0.98 million in July 2009 to 3.34 million in July 2010, a staggering growth of 239%.
3. The number of Indian users on Orkut, another major social networking site,was an astonishing 19.87 million in July 2010.
4. Let’s look at India’s number one professional networking site – LinkedIn.com. In July 2010 3.2 million unique users accessed it.
5. This is not all. Ibibo.com had 2.96 million unique users and Yahoo Pulse had 3.5 million unique users.
Can you think of any Indian newspaper, television channel or radio station coming close to these numbers?
No.
What’s even more important is that these are not cold numbers. They are not statistics, but actually people who are logging on to social media sites, commenting, laughing, interacting, sharing information and building communities.
Can you ignore them?
Can you say that Internet has not arrived in India? It lacks sufficient numbers to interest you.
As a corporate communication professional, you will be making a big mistake.
You can’t ignore social Media in India today. Full stop.
