60% of social media users belong to non-metros – ViziSense media report

ViziSense released a report on the dynamics of the consumption of social media in India, capturing data from the ViziSense panel, for the time period of Jan to July 2010. 60% of the active internet users in India, are present on social networks. Interestingly enough, 60% of these users are from non-metros. The report analyses trends amongst the various demographics and geographics in India.

Tug of war between Facebook vs Orkut – top three trends

It is not unknown Facebook has seen an exponential growth that set all the eye-balls rolling. It has grown two fold over the past seven months.The new study reveals that Facebook has the highest reach and approximately 2.21 crore people accessed Facebook in July 2010. Orkut followed suit with 1.85 crore users. Together Orkut and Facebook forms 90% of the social media populace. Rest of the players are at a lagging distance. Ibibo stands at the third position with 35.6 lakh users and has been increasing losing customers to other networks. It is not surprising to see Twitter make a fast leap to become the fourth most popular site.
There has been a significant change in the photosharing and video sharing behaviour of the users. Even professional photographers, who used photo sharing sites like Flickr, have shown a shift towards the social networking sites. According to the report, ‘Home page’, ‘Applications’ and ‘Photos’ comes across as the most visited features on Facebook while on Orkut ‘Home Page’, ‘Scraps’ and ‘Photos’ were the most visited features.
More than 90% of users visiting social media sites visit Orkut and Facebook. 50-60% users on Facebook and Orkut visit both sites. Moving ahead, we expect this number to fall in favor of Facebook as users find their complete circle of friends on a single, more dominant network. Other networks in comparison have around 90% of their users on Facebook and Orkut.

July 2010	Unique users	Page Views
Facebook.com	22.1M	2,780M
Orkut	18.5M	1,671M
Ibibo.com	3.56M	141M
Twitter.com	3.14M	38.7M
Linkedin.com	2.95M	79.4M
Bharatstudent.com	2.95M	22.9M

Top three trends amongst various age brackets

Highest number of users range between 15-24 years of age with the exception of Linkedin, which because of its inherent nature, has a higher number of users within the age bracket 25-34.
Social networks being primarily driven by the youth, have maximum number of users in the less than 2 lakhs income category
Since majority LinkedIn users are in their middle ages, they earn an income above 5 lakhs. Other sites in comparison have 20-25% of their users earning over 5 lakhs.

Impact of education on the use of social networks

Graduates and those pursuing graduation seem to the most ardent followers of the social networks, which explains the huge segment of users between the ages 18-24.

Top three trends in the activity levels

Activity steps up post noon, spiking between 6 – 10 p.m.
The age group 25-35, increases its usage of social networks around 3 p.m. which clearly indicates that working professionals mostly begin to ease out at the workplace. Users in the 15-24 age bracket are most active between 7 to 9 pm, which shows that they are using home computers more than the mobile, as popularly believed.
Encouraging news is that, more than 50% users return to the social networking portals more than once a day. The frequency of usage seems have to gone up, with Facebook showing the most amount of loyalty amongst users with more than three visits on a single day.

“Facebook is the most engaging site with the highest time spent by users as well as the highest incidence of users who return to the site on the same day.”

Applications

The application economy shows a lot of promise. The following summary gives you a peek into the key insights –

Taking Facebook as a case in point, applications show rampant usage, when compared to other commonly used features like photos and home page.
Demographically, boys between the ages 15-24 spend 52% of their time on Facebook applications. However, the overall share for this age bracket on Facebook, is just over 40% which is an encouraging news for small business with budget constraints. Application developers should get a hint where to invest their monies.
FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Café World and RYBirthday rule the roost on Facebook, with both men and women playing FarmVille the most. RYBirthday is used most by the 45+ age group.

“Interestingly, women have shown a huge liking and following of the Café World application contributing to a substantial 37% usage of this application.”

Disclaimer: Views of authors are personal and do not represent the views of Blogworks, or any of its clients.

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