Social networking in India, a marketers dream
Social networking online is a concept by which people can connect to each other, to find people of common interests. This can work for reasons ranging from dating, to plain vanilla networking. Here, the enterprise's job is only to set up a platform by which people can find other such people, and also to give them features that can enable them to stay together.
Orkut and Friendster have long ruled this market. However, it was such a basic form of networking, that the user would get online, set up his profile, and over many visits, keep adding his other friends to his network. Sure, it had its little features like maintaining birthdays and stuff like that, but beyond that, your social network was quite dead. There was no reason to keep coming back.
Then, facebook happened. Facebook is a concept by which people, mostly college students, could stay networked with each other, and make friends online. It carried a plethora of features, and you required to hold a .edu email ID to register. This was done for the purpose of security.
Facebook took America by storm, and within a few years, the statistics are as follows:
* 5M+ registered users
* coverage of 45% of US colleges (a total of 2,000 - representing 8M students)
* 80% penetration among students of colleges that are on the platform
* 10th most visited Internet site in the US
* 5.5B page/views a month (230M page/views a day)
* 8.5M unique visitors
* signing 20,000 new users a day
* repeat usage: daily 70%, weekly 85%, monthly 93% – can you think of another site that sees 93% of its registered users coming back every month ?
Source: Jeff Clavier
If India could have a model like this, where college students and school students could be on a single network, can you imagine the way the rules of marketing would change?
This is one of the most juicy target segments for most products in the market, and it would be a marketers dream to be able to tap into this segment. In this area, very few companies have taken initiatives. One of the few early players seems to be Yaari, a place where such higher levels of security can be provided.
However, these are early days, and the potential is enormous. Any more social networks, anyone?
I also write at Comfortably numb...
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Excellent observations on Social networking in India. Yes, this ia a area not too well developed here and I started exploring several web20 sites and decided to write my own - India Social Network.
India Social Network is fun site aimed at Indians from around the world. Ask questions, answer some, vote what you like, tag people...etc.
India Social Network was built as a Web 2.0 platform utilizing primarly microsoft technologies. The inspiration came to build the site from several web 2.0 sites like digg, consumating, tagged etc. We saw that they were all focued on the US crowd and did not quite suite the global Indian in terms of culture, views etc. It took around 3 months of weekend and few late nights to put it all together.
Reviews welcome!
Thanks!
Girish
India Social Network
NewAdda.Org is an attempt to localize Social Networking to Navi Mumbai.This will be the first Social Networking website made exclusively for Navi Mumbaities.This City of 21st Century will be the first City in India to get its exclusive Social Networking website.NewAdda.org will allow the members to create their own Area(Adda) and invite friends or visit their Adda.It will be a cross breed of MySpace and Orkut flavoured for Navi Mumbaities.NewAdda.org is soon to be released and will be alive and kicking.
I personally think social networking, globally, has reached its peak…but I still feel that the Indian scenario is such that this market is yet to be tapped by a major company. As a result, many social networking sits are opening up day after day…but one needs to wait and watch a to how these sites fare cuz there have been many flaws in some of these sites. On the other hand, there is another major player in the form of Reliance which is soon to enter this market with its own site called www.bigadda.com, which promises to be the next adda for the people. No information has been given about their services, but u can visit the sites and vote for ur favorite logo…
Hi All,
We have also launched our Indian Social Networking site called SaffronConnect (http://www.saffronconnect.com) in Beta. SaffronConnect.com is a music and social networking destination focused on serving the global South Asian market - it is a platform that creates a hybrid of “MySpace” and “iTunes” for the South Asian market – allowing independent artists, music labels and video content owners to upload, share and sell their content to a community of users with interests in South Asian media. Users, in turn, will be able to sample, hear, download and share songs among their friends and other members. Some key artists whose content is currently available on Saffron Connect include Bally Sagoo, Rishi Rich, Gunjan, Karmacy, and Bohemia. Content from Saffron Connect will also be distributed to services such as iTunes, Yahoo Music, and more.
Woudl appreciate yout comments on the site.
Thanks!
Krishna
Yes please! The more the merrier, as they say.
The rules of marketing are already changing. Of this there is no doubt. I'm beginning to believe that, very soon, marketing will play a more critical role in business development than sales and swallow a huge helping of the budget that ad firms enjoy right now.. Call this web 2.0 or marketing 2.0 or advertising 2.0 or anything, it's happening!
Feroz.
www.bechums.com
What is this Bechums???Bechums is a Social Cause Networking Website.Social Cause Networking means we use Social Networking for a good cause.The Concept here is very simple,It is a known fact that websites make money by hosting advertisements.More members a website has...more money they earn.What have you done is made the firm dance to the bank.What if this money earned by the site is used for feeding a Poor child,Spreading Aids awareness and helping Aids affected patients???That is exactly what Bechums does.We will give out 70% money earned from advertisements in our website to organizations working on these missions.Now what is your contribution here?We are not asking any money from you....All we need you to do is keep this website alive by spreading this website and asking your friends to join this website,as more the members...more will be the advertisement deals.What about the remaining 30% of the money earned from the advertisements? We will use the same for paying out our Hosting bills.So what are you waiting for.....Have Fun with a meaning.....Remember your Single blog article or scrap could feed a Hungry soul somewhere in the world.....
Press Release:http://www.prlog.org/10014750-asia-first-social-cause-networking-website.html