Top Social Media Trends in India

Social Media Statistics and Facts, You Need to Know

Facebook Facts

• Facebook has 260 million active users in India—that’s the highest they have in any country
• The largest user group by age on Facebook is 18–24 years, with a whopping 97.2 million users
• In terms of the number of users per city, Mumbai has the highest number of Facebook users, followed by Delhi and Bengaluru
• The most popular Facebook page in India belongs to Narendra Modi—it’s also one of the fastest-growing Facebook pages in India
• 52% of Indians use Facebook as a source of news
• Facebook was dethroned by TikTok, but it still managed 160 million downloads in India this year

The rise of Instagram

• There are 80 million people on Instagram in India as of January 2020.
• People between the ages of 18–24 are the largest age group for Instagram, which shows that it really is a platform for young consumers—if you want to reach your younger audiences, Instagram is your go-to tool
• There is over a 5.6% growth for Instagram reach every quarter
• India has the third-largest number of fake followers on Instagram after the US and Brazil. This is the dark side of Instagram
• Engagement rate for posts by higher education profiles is 3.96%

Whatsapp – India success story

• India has 400 million users on WhatsApp
• WhatsApp got over 134 million downloads in 2019.
• The company gained approval in February 2020 from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to roll out its payments platform, WhatsApp Pay, in the country. The company has been running a pilot programme for payments with one million users, but it will eventually be available to all of its users in the country, in a phased manner
• Adding payments makes WhatsApp a major competitor to other payments platforms here, including PhonePe, Google Pay and PayTM.

Twitter Facts

• India has 11.45 million users on Twitter
• 18% of social media users in India look at Twitter as a source of news
• Twitter usage, unlike other platforms, is actually decreasing—2.2% per quarter
• Gender inequality is really high on Twitter with 16% of the audience being female and 84% of the audience being male
• The most common type of Twitter interaction is likes with 83% of the engagement coming from likes, followed by retweets, 9% engagement and then Replies 8% engagement

YouTube – India Spotlight

• YouTube has 265 million active users in India
• Over 95% of the online video consumption is in Indian languages and Bengali content is growing more than 100% year-on-year in watch time
• More than 1200 creators in the country have crossed the million-subscriber threshold. Just five years ago there were only two creators with one million subscribers

Snapchat – Focus on India market

• India ranked in second place with a Snapchat audience base of 22.95 million users behind the United States
• 15.1 million people use Snapchat daily in India
• Snapchat usage is increasing in India. There has been a 40% increase in the number of daily users in India from Q2 2018 to Q2 2019
• Snapchat supports four Indian languages—Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi and Gujarati
• Snapchat grew 75% year on year in 2018, with 55% of the audience being women, which makes it one of the extremely rare platforms with a female majority

LinkedIn – The Professional network of India

• India is the second-largest market for LinkedIn with 62 million active users
• 7.4% of LinkedIn traffic is from India
• SlideShare (owned by LinkedIn) is one of the top 100 websites in India with a ranking of 75
• 22% of influencers from India identify LinkedIn as a very important platform for Influencer marketing
• LinkedIn posted USD 5.2 million profit in India with an increase in net profit from 2017 to 2018 by 26%

TikTok – India’s breakout app in 2019

• The TikTok app has been downloaded over 1.5 billion times worldwide, on November 14, 2019. 466 million of those come from India, 173 million from China, and 123 million from the US
• Indians accounted for 48% of the 1,560 hours spent on TikTok by users outside China
• India accounted for 44%, or 323 million, of 2019’s total TikTok app downloads, a 27% increase from 2018
• Users in India spent over 5.5 billion hours on TikTok in 2019, a startling increase from the 900 million hours spent by Indian users in 2018, which just highlights the sensational growth the app has seen over the past year

Telegram

• There are 300 million Telegram monthly users, as of October 2019, Telegram is targeting 1 billion users by 2022
• Telegram’s monthly active users count (on Android) in India is at almost 30 million in September 2019 from 18 million in December 2018. Almost 12% of Telegram’s global user base is in India as of September 2019
• 365 million downloads of Telegram, as of August 2019
• 15 billion Telegram messages were being sent daily in February 2016—the last time Telegram made this stat public
• As of September 2019, the most subscribed Telegram channel is HINDI HD MOVIES, with 3.2 million subscribers
• As of September 2019, the official Telegram News channel has the highest average post reach, with 1.6 million views.

Social Media in Education

Facebook

• Facebook Education page is a professional learning community for educators to come together to share, learn and inspire one another. Facebook Education host events, share resources and engage the educational community in global conversation
• Facebook Education provides access and equity in educational opportunities for all learners. Its connected groups allow educators to come together to share ideas, explore new ones, and collaborate to tackle challenges
• Facebook Education has programmes in collaboration with Workplace, InspirEd, TechPrep, Facebook groups, Messenger, Virtual experiences to give learners perspective on Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, and Gear VR
• Computer science programs: TechStart, Engineer for the week, CodeFWD
• Social and emotional learning: InspirEd, Fb Youth Portal

Instagram

• Top 5 Indian universities on Instagram are: Parul University (66.2 k followers), Chandigarh University (47.9 k followers), ISBM University (33.4 k followers), CEPT University (29.9 k followers), IIT Madras (22.2 k followers).
• There are 17.4 million and 415.7 k photos and videos respectively from ‘education’ and ‘highereducation’ hashtag in Instagram

Whatsapp

• WhatsApp Bots enables educational institutions, private or public, to be in control. With the control and legitimacy of the communication channel as a business tool and other possibilities. Use of WhatsApp Bots is in 3 key areas:
  1. Educational Marketing
  2. Educational Management & Administration
  3. Teaching and learning
• WhatsApp is used as a tool for lead generation, Lead Qualification, Engagement campaigns, customer retention, and relationship management, Student support
• The advantage with WhatsApp Bots is that in case the issue is too complex and the bot is not able to help the student, then a chatbot-human handoff takes over. University staff will be prompted to take over the conversation thread and advise on the issue at hand. Alternatively, if no member of staff is available, the bot can offer the student to schedule a meeting or a call

Twitter

• Top 5 Indian universities on Instagram are: IIT Bombay (72.1 k followers), IIT Madras (66.3 k followers), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (65.1 k followers), IISc Bangalore (49.4 k followers), Sri Sri University (33.8 k followers)
• Engagement rate for tweets by higher education profiles is 0.0079%

YouTube

• YouTube EDU is a sub-section of YouTube that provides access to more than 500 k educational videos from organisations like Stanford University, PBS, TED, Khan Academy, Steve Spangler Science, and Numberphile
• YouTube Learning is a channel that features some of the best how-to, DIY, tutorial and educational videos on YouTube.

Snapchat

• Photomath, the world’s most used math education app has a partnership with Snap Inc, that invites Snapchat users to solve any math equation through their camera. To access the feature, users simply “press and hold” on the Snapchat camera when a math equation is in view, and Photomath’s math solver engine will recognize the problem and immediately generate a solution on the Snapchat camera screen. Problem scanning works for both handwritten and printed math problems.
• This feature within the Snapchat camera allows Photomath to give more students access to on-demand math support that could help them.

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn Learning is a subsidiary of LinkedIn, offering video courses taught by industry experts in software, creative, and business skills. Most popular courses are on Excel, Marketing and Social Media

TikTok

• TikTok, owned by the world’s most valued start-up ByteDance, said it’s working with a number of content creators and firms in India to populate the platform with educational videos. The ByteDance owned short video platform also popularised ed-tech content across India through the ‘EduTok’ hashtag. The company said that since its launch this summer the videos grabbed around 48.7 billion views and was shared 1.8 billion times on TikTok.
• It has partnered with ed-tech start-ups Vedantu, Toppr, Made Easy and Gradeup that will produce educational content for TikTok. It is also collaborating with social enterprises Josh Talks and the Nudge Foundation to mentor 5,000 people across India. (Some of the partnerships were disclosed a few months ago.) An executive with Josh Talks said the firm has been able to reach more than 35 million users in less than two months on TikTok, far more users than it has attracted on other platforms.

Telegram

• Telegram is a popular platform due to a useful feature—the channels, which makes up a great tool to promote an educational organisation. If configured and managed accordingly, a channel can become a great source of information for students. Each Telegram channel has its own public or private link, so anyone can join a channel through a link and get access to the channel’s content

Top Telegram Channels related to education are Target Study IQ (288 k subscribers), Civil Services (266 k subscribers), UPSC Prelims (102 k subscribers).