Mediaboss Marketing

In India, approximately 10 mn urban Indians used their mobile phones for engaging in social networking during the quarter ending August, 2009, a reach of 3.3 percent among urban Indian mobile phone users.

According to a recent analysis by Openware Systems, mobile social networking now represents close to half of all mobile web usage in the United States. The Internet Advertising Bureau similarly recently reported a 179 percent year-over-year increase in the number of mobile handsets accessing social media sites, compared to a 10 percent increase in PC visitors to the same sites.

Social networking sites have now emerged as one of the leading applications accessed by mobile subscribers the world over, taking over from traditional voice and data usage and manual accessing of sites via computer. Is this really true?

According to Kailash Jangir, deputy general manager- network planning for TTML, Mumbai, "Most mobile users in India still use mobiles for voice and data applications, as social networking sites often do not give the option of regional language content.

However, he agrees that social networking on mobiles has increased by four to five per cent since the last five years, but mainly it is for use of personal and not official or corporate purposes.

Agreeing with him, Robert A, general manager, Global Managed Services Operations, Tata Communications, Chennai, says, The exception to corporate use of social networking sites is the Google search engine which is undoubtedly the number one search engine and is included as a default application in all mobiles, and LinkedIn, wherein we have witnessed a 10-15 per cent increase in recent years.

Continuing on the same note, he says, The main use of social networking sites by our clientele is firstly for personal information sharing, and secondly for HR purposes of verifying the background and profile of aspiring candidates, for which sites like Facebook and Monster, apart from LinkedIn are also used.

Let's match these statements with some statistics.

According to reports on Track.in, Delhi has the maximum number of users of social networking sites via mobile phones at 9.7 per cent, followed by Mumbai at 6.4 per cent, Chennai at 4 per cent and Kolkata at 3.3 per cent.

While Orkut rules the telecom market in social networking sphere, with over 3 million users, it is followed closely by Yahoo! Dating with 2.1 million users and Facebook with 1.97 million users.

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A socially mobile India is emerging in the new decade