Indian Social Media Landscape

An announcement.

Sally Hooton, editor of the DMI magazine, approached us recently to write an article on social media. It was our privilege to be associated with DMI, the world’s only global business title for direct and interactive marketers based out of United Kingdom. The article talks about social media in relevance to India in conjunction with our research on social media.

The article can be viewed in the online format on Page 36.

If you would like to download the article then do click on the Scribd Link given below.

This is the second section of the research that we have carried out on social media with respect to India. Do read the first section.

Part 2 – To map out the current usage pattern of social media of Indians

Q5) How much time do you spend everyday on blogs, social networking and uploading photos and videos?

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It is really surprising to note that more than 1/3rd of the respondents spend more than 30 minutes everyday on social media sites.

Windchimes wishes its readers a very exciting and adventurous 2009

There is absolute dearth of statistics on social media with respect to India or Indians. It is important to understand the prevalence of social media in our lives. There are studies indicating that close to 40 mn Indians are online. But really nothing beyond that!!

So what are these people doing online? How important is social media to them? How do they consumer social media? How is social media impacting the purchase behavior? How can marketers leverage social media platforms to reach out to their potential consumers. We carried out research to find out answers to these questions to help us understand and give an insight from an Indian context.

The research data that we are presenting is representative of 3 Indian cities; Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. While we have received responses from people from other cities but they weren’t statistically significant. The responses have been collated as whole and not individually of 3 cities.

This is the second in series of the essentials of a blog. In the first part we spoke about content, layout and subscription features. There are sevral ways to increase visibility for your blog but right now let’s continue with highlighting some of the other features that are a must for your blog before you start promoting it.

1.    Maintain a blog roll

Blog roll is an individual’s favourite list of blog links that you have mentioned in the side bar of your blog. Most of the bloggers exchange links in order to increase their visibility and get more readers. The blogs links could be about subjects related to what you write about or could be on your other interests you pursue.

I hear people saying that blogging has really caught on. I wouldn’t go that far – possibly the term ‘blogging’ surely has caught on!! A lot of people do start their blogs and then get lost somewhere down the lane. A lot of it could possibly because of the low hits their blogs are generating. I think it’s mostly because some of the essential aspects of a blog are missing!!

So, it wouldn’t be bad idea to explore this subject more. What we are going to do here is clean up the dust that has settled on the blog, enhance it with few tools and list out few essentials that are a must for each blog!!

1.    First things first. Your blog is your own identity!!

Blogs are a reflection of you as a person. Feel free to write in your own inimitable style. The same rule applies for corporate blogs too. Each brand enjoys a certain personality and character and blogs have to remain true to that brand value.

Don’t worry about being judged. As long as your blog post uses language that is simple and easily understood, there is no right or wrong here.