Digital might become the subset of social: Socialathon 2014
The reach of social media today is staggering. Marketers, all across the world have now realised the power of social media and are leaving no stones unturned to leverage this massive social media user base. Facebook alone has 829 million daily active users on average in June 2014 and 1.32 billion monthly active users as of June 30, 2014. Twitter has 271 million monthly active users with 500 million Tweets sent per day.
These are some huge numbers! Therefore, the questions that arises now is, with such enormous user base, would social media eventually phase out traditional media? Or they can be strategically collaborated by marketers for an enhanced collective output? During yet another super engaging session at Socialathon 2014, a group of brilliant panelists explored the intricacies of this question and tried to figure out the future of social media marketing.
The theme of this session was ‘Personalisation with Scale: Social media’s relationship with traditional platforms in emerging markets’. The panelists included; Arjun Kolady, Head of Telco & Tech, Facebook India, Rajiv Kumar, Director – Sales & Mktg, Modi Revlon and Senthil Anand, Head, KRDS India. The session was moderated by Rajiv Dingra, Founder and CEO, WATConsult.
The great Indian social media growth
Setting the tone of the session, Mr Dhingra, highlighted the fact that how digital and social media has grown over the past couple of years in India. Around 8 years ago, social media would not even make it to the review meets. In a span of 8-9 years, social media has come a long way in India; from not being on the map at all to being at the same league as ATL media.
“Digital, overall in India is growing at 35 per cent. Social media is already crossing 120-150 million users in India and is expected to reach close to 400 million users in the next three to four years. Digital, as an industry, in terms of branding, advertising and marketing spend, is somewhere between 8-12 per cent of the overall advertising spend; which is somewhere close to USD 800-900 million. The question here that is of concern is how do brands perceive social media as a standalone medium for branding, advertising and marketing,” he added.
Mr Kolady highlighted that Facebook has about 100 million monthly active users in India, out of which 84 million are mobile. “When I joined Facebook in 2012, it had 42 million users and 20 million were on mobile. In two years, the number has doubled and we have double the number of users on mobile than we had overall on Facebook in 2012. The growth has been staggering!”
He added that there are two parts to this evolution – Facebook as a platform has evolved from a desktop to mobile platform and secondly, the conversation has moved away from being a social only approach to more social plus approach. The evolution is not something that is social but the evolution is more about figuring about how this link fits into the overall media mix and how it can solve larger business problem.
Branding goes social!
Talking about how brands are using social media for branding purposes, Mr Kumar of Modi Revlon, stated that, last year, their budget that went into digital was 100 per cent. “We have found digital to be highly appropriate for us as a company. It’s imperative for us to understand our consumers and reach them when they are at the right frame of mind. Hampering them with repeated advertisements is not the right way to do that. Social media comes in handy here. The Revlon India page is a very happening page and we found that it’s a great way to reach out to our consumers.”
He also highlighted that going forward, they have plans to integrate all media. For engaging audience on social media, they would use traditional media to create some exciting news that can be shared on the social media.
Senthil Anand, Head, KRDS India, shared a very interesting example of a brand using crowdsourcing and social media. Tanishq, in a contest, asked working women to come up with their own jewellery designs and post it online. The design that wins with the maximum votes would be picked up by Tanishq with the name of the designer engraved on it. Since this was a people led initiative, people themselves spread the word and popularised it. This simple crowdsourcing exercise worked really well for the brand. The main objective of this initiative was not sales, but the engagement led to sales.
Mr Kolady highlighted that even with the 100 million user base, it’s very easy to identify your target demographics. The idea is to identify the right target demographics, drive communication around that particular audience and finally the engagement would drive the objective.
“As the prices of mobile devices drop and connectivity goes up, there is a very high possibility that digital itself might become a subset of social. The reasons why people are coming online today are very different than what they used to be,” he added.
