5 takeaways from Rajiv Dingra's keynote on State of Indian Social Media Industry

Rajiv Dingra, Founder & CEO, WATConsult shared his opinion on the State of Indian Social Media Industry, basis trends and insights.

With the Indian social media landscape booming to grow with leaps and bounds, peaking at 136 million users this year, it would behoove marketers and advertisers to establish their presence where their audience lives.

Honoring the medium that connects the world on World Social Media Day, Rajiv Dingra, Founder and CEO, WATConsult, shared his thoughts and deductions about the State of Indian Social Media Industry. Stemming from years of experience, working with some of the most formidable and pioneering brands in the country, let us look at the trends that Rajiv has observed and foresees in the Indian Social Media Industry.

“India is one of the largest countries in the world as far as Facebook is concerned with the largest amount of active users, and more than 73 million Indian users access the platform through their mobile phones."

These are statistics as of January 2017 and Facebook has already been growing in the past six months as well.

Gauging the magnitude of social media with respect to the Indian digital user, Rajiv Dingra spoke about the rise of social media with statistics that reinforce the growing importance of social media in India, and of the Indian user to social media platforms.

“Video content is the number one piece of content on Facebook, and over the last two years we have seen Instagram and Snapchat scale up in a big way with what I call, ‘bite sized videos,’ that audiences can consume over a short period of time."

These bite sized videos are perishable and of course we know them as Stories on both, Snapchat and Instagram.

The increasing focus of social media platforms' video content, Facebook being one of the platforms who are aggressively pursuing more video on their platform reflects Rajiv’s observation regarding the rise of video on social media.

The push for more video content has made consumption possible on the go and the visual medium has been redefined due to smartphones. The Indian telecom industry has been revolutionized since the entry of Reliance Jio, which has given the opportunity to create more video content in the hands of many. "Mobile and Video are the two pillars through which social media is scaling up in India massively,” Rajiv opined.

The interdependence between smartphones and video creation/consumption is huge and the growth of video will be through the growth of smartphones and internet connectivity across India.

“Instagram has been one of the fastest growing platforms for businesses, and has a unique positioning compared to all the players. It combines the best of multiple social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat with minimal picture based posts, great filters that help one project a certain lifestyle,hashtag based discovery, and Instagram Stories which needless to say is a leaf out of Snapchat’s book.”

Rajiv Dingra explains how today, Instagram has registered itself as the biggest and the most comprehensive and visually appealing social media marketing platforms among all others. Its broader target audience as compared to Snapchat and minimalistic approach based on aesthetic is what drives its success.

“Two things became very popular last year - chatbots and 360 degree Videos."

Dingra explained that chatbots have the opportunity to leverage social media, and a lot of brands have launched their chatbots and driven interaction and transactions from it. 360 Degree video provide social media users with engaging and immersive video content which will revolutionize the industry as it catches on with audiences and brands alike.

“Majority of brands in India are doing very well on social media although there are many brands that are under leveraging the medium."

Social media is not about just putting a content bucket up and updating your pages from time to time. Make sure your brand presence goes from awareness, interest, desire and action. For that brands need to invest more time, money as well as thought into how they want to leverage each social media platform to boost their engagement across platforms.

Our esteemed guest and keynote speaker, Rajiv Dingra, shared his thoughts at India’s first ever social media Live conference by Social Samosa, #SMLive on the State of the Indian Social Media Industry.