Social Media- Love It Or Hate It, But You Can't Ignore It

Skandaram Vasudevan Aug 18, 2022

For most of us, social media has won a special place in our head and heart. It has not only increased connectivity among people but also changed how we communicate and share details with our social circle.

Social Media has basically become a lens to observe the happenings of the world that are used for trend-spotting, identifying the general thought or sentiment for any action, brand or campaign. Additionally, it has become a crucial cog in the overall readership patterns of people, with most publications shifting to an online medium, it has become a common practice to drive awareness of content through social media pages.

It is interesting to observe that social media has taken over the same activities that used to exist in non-digital forms throughout all these years. The fundamental actions remain the same, however, social media has just changed the medium of consumption and the reach of the audience that is involved in the same.

Evolution of Social Media

The evolution of social media can take on interesting angles, depending on how one defines this complex medium. If we are talking about connectivity and information exploration, then it can trace its roots all the way to the 1970s (CompuServe and the Bulletin Board System). This was among the initial means provided to access social media, where people were able to instantaneously reach their friends and connections. However, this did not reach India, as the digital age had not yet taken its roots in the country back then.

If we take the modern digital age globally, the era of social media started with Friendster in 2002, which behaved more like a connection platform, having social circles that people with common interests could join and converse about. Eventually, this led to the launch of LinkedIn globally as a place where career-minded individuals could gather and discuss various topics, although it would make its presence in India felt slightly later. This was followed by the launch of MySpace, which took off in popularity to reach a majority of audiences, who could create and share their own pages.

In India, the main medium that first captured people’s attention (even more than MySpace) was Orkut. Orkut effectively kickstarted the era of social media in India. The main audience was the youth of the country, and they embraced the platform and the unique features that it offered. It again functioned on the basis of pure connectivity, allowing people to connect with their friends, old and new.

Orkut ruled the Indian market till the advent of Facebook, which had all of the features of Orkut but expanded on it to make it even more attractive to people. New features like the personal wall, status updates, pages and personal memorabilia meant that basically, it started dwarfing Orkut’s popularity and soon, caused it to fade into obscurity. Facebook harnessed the concept of Network Effects, and increased audience reaches multi-fold, something that Orkut was unable to combat. Facebook also didn’t rest on its laurels – it continued developments with communities, games, and new features among other things on the platform, ensuring there was something for everyone, which caused them to frequently visit the platform.

Following the heels of Facebook was the presence of Twitter in India. It jumped away from the whole connections bit to become an opinion-sharing platform. Twitter appealed to the digital generation with low attention spans by ensuring that tweets on the platform were short and succinct. It made it a lot easier for people to reach out to their idols as followers became the name of the game on the platform. Twitter, while still operating in the same space as Facebook, offered something entirely different and thus, was able to co-exist and grow in the country.

Following this gave advent to newer platforms, some of which stuck on in the Indian mindset. We had the advent of image sharing through Instagram and LinkedIn launched in India as a career-oriented social media platform. They offered something different and were able to make it work to build on network effects to expand and become viable in the country. This was the crucial difference that enabled them to survive.

Largely, the Indian social media landscape is still ruled by these giants to the day. While there are other platforms that still have a significant share of the market (Snapchat, which has captured the attention of the younger audiences and is slowly expanding to the larger market), these are the platforms that most brands largely have a presence in to try to reach out to their potential consumer base.

New Forms of Social Media

While we have seen how the traditional social media platforms are still present and running strong, this doesn’t mean that we have not seen newer developments in the space. Even the traditional platforms are constantly trying to bring in newer concepts to try to capture their audience – the biggest example was the adoption of reels by Meta across all of their platforms – to try to capture the imagination of the audience which was initially harnessed by other platforms.

Outside of this, if we expand the definition of social media to any platforms that help build connections and have the potential to reach a significant audience base, then we see various new shifts happening in the social space, which gives rise to newer social media formats.

Short Video

The short video market exploded when TikTok arrived in the country. Suddenly, everyone was on the platform, constantly consuming content and connecting with various creators through the same. This was a massive platform as it basically took on the low attention span of the digital audience through extremely engaging short-form video content, which captured the imagination of the country. Even post its ban, this trend never saw a dull day. Today, we see multiple short video platforms trying to build network effects which have sprung up as TikTok alternatives, and they are succeeding – capturing nearly the same audience as TikTok in its heyday. They have managed to get audiences in Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities as well on the platforms and are getting them to build on it through the form of content creation. This is definitely a new form of social media and it is growing from strength to strength.

Forums

Forums today are helping social media get into a firmer shape. They first started in the social space globally through blogs (LiveJournal and then Blogger), followed by niche platforms making their presence felt, serving as a handy fallback for like-minded people. These are forums about various topics (parenting, styling – among the plethora of interests that can exist) and they basically serve as a common fall-back for people who know they can connect with other people who will have reliable responses for the same issues. It is social media in the form of relatability and personalisation, where people can feel connected and related instead of distanced or overawed, as is common when encountering people among larger social networks.

Additionally, it is impossible to not discuss Quora while talking about forums in India. Quora serves as an informal social network, which operates on the knowledge-seeking and sharing principle. People connect with each other and look to certain reliable profiles for accurate answers. There is a fundamental effort put to build on network effects – all the hallmarks of a social network. It has opened itself up and brands have started realising the unique space it occupies in the Indian mind space and have started creating their own presence on the platforms – akin to what they would be doing on other social networks. Discussion forums are already existing in the social space and it is ripe for further growth in this segment.

Audio

Audio is another space which has the potential to become a massive social media presence in the near future. The first obvious route is podcasts, which are picking up massively in India. Podcasts serve as an informational/follow medium currently, but the concept is ripe to expand into a social media network in the near future.

Additionally, there have been forays into making audio a social space – the most obvious example could be Clubhouse, which facilitates discussions through the audio medium. It is a voice-based network in real-time. It has the potential to dominate the market (as it serves as an alternative to the overwhelming visual medium of social) and is definitely a space where we will see high traction in the near future.

Social Commerce

While social commerce is not a new platform like the others on this list, it is a medium that is gaining fast traction in the social space.

Traditionally, it involved awareness and consideration set, with the purchase happening elsewhere. Through social commerce (and as an extension, live commerce), social platforms are closing the loop through purchase, leading to end-to-end marketing and consumer influence.

This is definitely a trend that is attractive to brands as it provides another channel for sales to a consumer – and one with sharper targeting than most other platforms. This means that this trend will be fuelled by brands and is set to be present across most social platforms in the coming days.

What's Up With Social Media?

Social media platforms have been dominating the news recently – and not always for positive reasons. There has been a recent overlook into how social platforms handle content – where they just post the content but avoid any legal ramifications for the same. Countries across the globe are now placing more responsibilities on social platforms as a means to regulate them, which could have far-reaching ramifications for how content is handled and shared on these platforms.

Advertising revenue is another additional factor to consider. Recent changes mean that influencers and celebrities have to clearly showcase when they are doing paid promotions and when they are not. This enables their audience to accurately gauge their responses to any particular piece of content.

Additionally, social platforms are being called up by authorities regarding user anonymity. This was especially evident during the recent racial attacks on footballers by audiences – where measures are being put in place for the user data to come out to ensure real-life ramifications.

Data privacy is another field where there is a lot of conversation in recent times – along with multiple documentaries around how companies handle data. Social Platforms tend to make the entire process of opting out of data collection cumbersome to get drop-offs during the process – something which users have called upon to change.

Advertising in Social Media

Advertising has always been the core of social media. The fact that it is free to use and enables connection across people of all demographics means it will always have a high audience base. And that enables people to effectively maintain a virtual presence of their lives on social media, using it as a journal and segway into their lives.

This enables social platforms to collect a massive amount of data about their audience’s behaviour – their interests, their life stages, their relationship status – practically nothing is out of bounds for updates on social media (and by extension, mapping of data for social platforms). This, in turn, enables these platforms to offer a wide range of audience behaviour targeting which can be tapped into by brands – from general interests to current job titles to people’s preference for a particular level of luxury – social media platforms have it all to be harnessed by brands. The whole concept of detailed targeting on digital originated from social platforms due to the in-depth behavioural understanding present.

Revenue for social platforms usually comes from advertisements – the user's entry is free, so there is the scope for building complex and massive user networks. This, in turn, means that there is a huge potential consumer base for brands to target – which they do through paid advertising. The higher the network effects and users on the platform, the higher the ability to monetise it for increased revenue.

These platforms have been used by brands as a separate channel to communicate with the consumer (a lot of times, the same consumer across different channels). The challenge remains around how to engage the consumer through different social platforms, create value across each platform and make them follow the brand, as it increases the touchpoints for the consumer.

Advertising on social can be of various means – pure play content marketing where certain brands create engaging content that their consumers make a point to follow their pages, thus increasing advertising through organic content measures. There are also various post promotions – where the brand pushes their content onto new and existing users through paid marketing – which opens up access to new consumers. These can be posts, images and videos, which are all promotable through a media push. Additionally, there is also social influencer marketing, where brands reach out to consumers through influencers who promote the brand to their following on social platforms, increasing the overall reach available.

Social platforms generally give pre-defined objectives that can be decided ahead of creating a campaign (from awareness objectives to result-oriented objectives like store visits). Choosing the right objective is as important as selecting the right audiences as these are the important basics one needs to get right to enable successful advertising in the social sphere.

Making The Most of Social Media Advertising

Uniformity helps- We know brands are present across multiple social platforms (and a lot of times, across multiple touchpoints on the same platform). Therefore, it becomes important that they approach consumers with an omnichannel uniform presence – they maintain consistency in how they treat their availability across social platforms. This enables their consumers to get an understanding of what to expect from the brand, and they will behave accordingly.

Regular posting is vital- 'Out of sight, out of mind' is a term that could have been cherry-picked for social media. Posting regularly helps brands stay in touch with consumers and it gives consumers something new to expect from the brand with reasonable regularity. Lack of this aspect means that the consumer will often mean that brands start to slip from the consideration set due to the plethora of choices available.

Engaging content- This is something that is non-negotiable in today’s day and age. The attention span of the digital consumer is small and as such, brands need to have engaging content to stand out in the consumer’s mind. Keeping posts interesting becomes paramount and as such, overall engagement across organic content becomes the name of the game.

Value is important- It’s never just about selling. Just like marketing, social media advertising works when brands provide value for consumers rather than focus on pure selling. Just plain product posts will only go so far.

A unique strategy for each platform- Each social platform has its own selling point and is used by consumers for different purposes (the same consumer would behave very differently on Instagram and Twitter, for example). By extension, it would be a very risky strategy for brands to treat each platform the same. While it becomes important to maintain the same tone of voice across platforms, the content that needs to go on each platform has to be dramatically different to start adding value for the consumer across multiple platforms.

Promotions become necessary- Social Media platforms have their own internal algorithms which means that brands might not reach their entire audience base through organic content posting (in fact, in most cases, it is barely a tenth of the same). In this scenario, media promotions on social platforms become absolutely vital in enabling brands to reach the right audiences – this allows them to expand their consumer base by making their brand more discoverable to newer audiences.

Metrics and Targeting are important- Each social platform has its own way to define each metric. It becomes vitally important to identify and understand what each metric means on the platform, and to manage expectations accordingly. (For example, the definition of a completed view-through is different for different platforms). Additionally, it is equally important to gauge the different targeting parameters and what each of them means (for example, interest expressed means something very different in real life compared to how it becomes classified on social media).

What Next?

Social Media, ultimately, is a digital behemoth that has made its presence felt in almost every aspect of our online communication. Social Media started off as the virtual aspect of our personal diaries that we used to maintain – it was a record and repository of our life. From there, it has evolved into a field that sets trends, shapes opinions enable agenda setting and has its roots in almost every action on the internet.

The power of social media is so massive that every industry is getting disrupted through social – recently, a real estate social media platform launched, which brings together buys, sellers, reviewers and discussions across the same platform, to make the aspect of buying a house seamless. It is prevalent as brands and audiences are realising the power it enables them to have – thus ensuring quick adoption in every aspect.

As new changes in technology continue to happen, social media will find newer ways and means to grow. The current landscape will be transformed – it is just a matter of who adapts best to the ever-fluctuating changes. But even transformed, the core aspect of social connections in social media will continue to prevail.

Like it or hate, we can’t live without it.