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 Pinterestand 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.
Marketers such as VinayBhatia of retailer Shoppers Stop have already spotted this trend. "We will have 12 or 13 videos exclusively for Youtube and we're integrating millions of our Facebook fanswith our First Citizen loyalty program too," he says.
Bhatia divides the social media world into: those who aggressively adopted this trend; and the late-comers to the field. He says now even the slackers are catching up as they see a clear monetary benefit from an aggressive social media presence.
Shoppers Stop offers special deals to its Facebook fans, gives them a longer preview of coming sales and is even using technology such as augmented reality to reach out on social networking sites.
"We are pushing our creative agencies to build marketing programs that place social networks at the centre, rather than at the periphery of the end objective," he says as he slips into a four-hour marathon meeting with them.
Social media sites have unveiled a series of new features to try to cater to businesses looking to ride this social media revolution. Facebook, for example, recently launched Facebook Exchange, to more precisely target users with campaigns--hitting those searching for home loans with campaigns with ads on their news feed.
Elsewhere, LinkedIn launched a targeting tool used by the likes of American Express to target affluent users with bespoke programs. Even newer sites such as Pinterest saw heightened corporate interest, with Dingra of WATConsult dubbing it as a fertile ground to observe young and middle-aged women's social media habits.
While Twitter has become the place to track politicians, celebrities and sportsmen, businesses too are slowly sensing an opportunity to use promoted tweets, trends and accounts to build their brands.
"The 66A case (in which two girls were arrested for their FB posts) may have happened on Facebook, but the people's voice was amplified on Twitter, which has become the digital voice of the Junta," adds Dingra.
Facebook's Reddy thinks that the next big opportunity will come when small businesses aggressively begin to use the site to grow their operations. Facebook and industry lobby FICCIplan to organise a six-city conference tour to familiarise small & medium businesses with the benefits of social media and will even hand out free Facebook credits (used to advertise with the site) as a sop to these units.
According to a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India and India Market Research Bureau, the Indian online advertising market, including classifieds, will grow by 54% in the next 12 months.
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