Following is the project that was submitted by Gaurang.

COLLEGE LOGO HERE

YOUR COLLEGE NAME

Project Report on:

An Analytical Study of Impact of Social Media Marketing on Indian Businesses

Under the guidance of Submitted by:

NGA-SCE FACULTY Name:

SAP ID:
Course: PGDXX

April - 2020

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 Acknowledgement

A successful research goes through several stages and on every stage you find different set of
people coming forward to support the research which further a shape of a pragmatic report. A
professional achieves success only when he works in a team, with a team and like a team with
perseverance to accomplish any professional goal. I humbly take this opportunity to
acknowledge the efforts and to express my sincere gratitude towards my peers and professors
who have contributed immensely by sharing their valuable thoughts, feedback, guidance over
the course for the completion of this research project.

Sense of optimism and positive attitude are the important qualities for a person to achieve
success in the undertaken endeavors. That said, I would like to express my gratitude towards
each person including my friends and family members who were directly or indirectly involved
in successful completion of the project. The project has been thoroughly insightful and a
learning process.

Every contribution big or small is valuable which broadens our perspective and evolves our
thought process. This project helped me in getting deeper insights about social media and how
social media impacts the global as well as indigenous businesses.

Name: XXXX
PGDMM – IV Semester
SAP ID: XXXX

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 Table of Content

S. No. Contents Page No.

1. Introduction 8
2. Literature Review 21
3. Research Methodology 34
4. Data Collection & Analysis 36
5. Research Findings 44
6. Recommendation & 47
Suggestions
7. Bibliography 49
8. Annexure 52

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 Objectives

While the social media has been there for a decade, business owners around the globe still
have to leverage the potential of social media, how different social media platforms impacts
different category of businesses like B2B, B2C, C2C, differently in terms of reach, increased
engagement, branding to stay fresh in the minds of the target audience.

A study into the usage, impact of social media marketing on different types of Indian
businesses such as business to business, business to consumers across different different
industry verticals such as HealthCare, IT, Manufacturing, Automobiles.

To explore to what extent can social media be used by Indian businesses, how will it be more
economical, faster, optimal way to reach out to target audience, to identify what all social
media platforms would be useful for different categories of businesses and to identify ways to
optimize the reach through social media marketing channels.

The study includes element of “Desk Analysis” and therefore, views of various writers and
researchers of Social Media will be included. The study includes:

1. How global businesses are adopting and using different social media platforms.
2. How businesses in developing economies are using social media
3. Reasons why social media as a marketing channel witnessed high adoption rate.
4. Different use cases of social media
5. Advantages of social media

Some of the specific objectives are:

1. To understand the features and usage of different social media platforms and how they
relate to different types of businesses (B2B, B2C) in India.
2. To determine the optimal social media platforms for Indian businesses belonging to
different industry verticals.
3. To identify different social media content types and which of those results in higher
performance for Indian Businesses.
4. To determine the way to calculate the social media campaign performance.
5. How Social Media helped Indian business in improving revenue, branding, customer
loyalty, engagement with customers.

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 Scope of Study

Social Media has multiple facets which can be applied to any business. In this study, the
scope encompasses understanding of social media in general, why there a need for social
media, how did the social media originate, what were the different social media platforms
which came into existence in the early days, how they evolve to the social media platforms
which are currently being used and how social media evolved over the years globally.

Implementation of social media as a marketing channel in Indian businesses gives different

avenues of its usage. Some of the roles of social media which we will study in detail are,
Sales - bringing in more clients, Careers - to fulfil job positions within a firm, Branding - to
increase the brand awareness and measuring the performance of social media activities with
global industry social media benchmarks and Support – to assist existing and potential
customers in resolving queries.

Globalisation is very important to develop economies of countries and to assist the global
trade and knowledge transfer, Internet played a very important role. We will study how Social
Media is assisting in global trade by helping global as well Indian businesses in reaching out
to the target audience.

Businesses market to regularly communicate with their potential customers. This study will
cover how social media assists businesses in creating awareness about their products and
services, what are the different ways of content which can be published through the social
media platforms.

Businesses set up different marketing campaigns with specific goals in mind and it is
prudent to optimize future campaigns and marketing efforts and therefore social media
analytics will be studied in depth and how Indian businesses leverage analytics data to
optimize the campaigns further.

Every social media platform serves different kind of business type and different kinds of
content types and therefore we will study and relate the kinds of businesses with their ideal
social media channels. Also, we will study different types of content and which social media
platforms are optimal for them.

We will study the adoption of social media in different countries. The countries the USA,
China and countries in European unions were the pioneers in using social media and as the
internet penetrated across the globe, how usage of social media increased in India and how
individuals and businesses are leveraging social media to engage among themselves.

Indian businesses of different maturity like Startups, SMEs, Large corporations have
started embracing social media. We will study how their social media presence looks like,
what social media platforms are they actively using and which ones are their primary
channels.

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 Executive Summary

Marketing is one of the most important functions of any business in existence as it is the
only department which results in an inflow of capital by the means of sales. Therefore, while
Marketing is seen as a support function by most of the businesses, the successful businesses
are pioneers in terms of investing in technological advancement of their marketing
departments.

Social Media is relatively newer Marketing Channel and it is changing how marketing is
done. Social Media is form of digital connection among people which happens on the internet
so that people can interact among themselves, exchange and collect information. Since it’s
introduction in 1994, the penetration rate of social media has seen rapid growth rate which has
made whole world to be accessible with just a single click. Some of the major Social Media
platforms are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, SnapChat, Tik Tok
which are used by individuals as well as organizations of all kinds. In just 10 years, the social
media users have increased from .97 Billion Users in 2010 to 2.97 Billion users in 2020,
marking 300% increase in adoption, the growth which is unprecedented and surpassed growth
rate of other mass media like Newspaper, Radio, TV, etc.

Social Media penetration rate highly depends on the Internet penetration in any country.
Globally, there are 4.5 Billion Internet users with penetration rate of 58.7% and has witnessed
Internet adoption growth rate of 1167% in last decade. India on contrary has currently 451
million Internet users forming 36% of the total population. Out of total internet users in India,
about 80% of the users, i.e. 371 million users are active social media users in India. Of the
total internet users, around 63% of the users are located in urban areas while 37% are in rural
areas. With that in mind, Social Media gives a massive opportunity to Indian businesses to
engage their target audience easily because spending a fortune by spending money buying
advertisements on non-digital channels such as newspapers, magazines, flex boards, etc.

There are social media platforms which are ideal for different kinds of businesses such as:
For businesses such as SalesForce, Oracle, SAP which are in B2B - Business to Business
Segment, there are platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare. For business such as
Zara, H&M, Apple, SkullCandy, McDonalds which are in B2B – Business to Consumers
Segment there are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, SnapChat, TikTok, etc.
With wide range of Social Media Platforms having millions of users belonging to all different
sets of demographics such as Location, Age, Gender, it’s a goldmine for any kind of business
which needs to reach out to its target audience locally as well as PAN India and globally
without spending any money.

Typical business has digital marketing channels such as Emails, Website, Blogging, Press
Releases which have only limited reach. With Social Media, the potential to share content and
spread awareness about products and services increased vastly. Social Media allows
companies to engage with their target audience and project themselves as experts in their
respective industry making it easier for consumers to recognize the companies eventually
making them a potential customer in future. Organizations like BMW, Jaguar, Parle, Apple,
OnePlus, Xiaomi engages with its customers regularly through Social Media and that’s how
they command millions of followers across social media platforms.

Social Media reduces costs of marketing as dependency on traditional media and other
digital marketing channels gets reduced which means more money can be spent on generating

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 content and graphics to even engage more audience with quality content. Through Social
Media, businesses are now able to brand themselves as the industry experts, are able to reach
out to large section of population which earlier was never heard of. Business are able to
interact with their customers and as well as prospects regularly which makes repeat sales very
easy. Moreover, Businesses are leveraging social media platforms as customer support
channels which is reducing the dependency on telephone based BPOs which are costlier to
manage and were very unproductive. Social Media based customer support is real time and
whenever a customer’s issue is solved successfully, customers publish a thank you note and
various types of appreciations which works as a great marketing tool in the form of
testimonials. That portrays the brand as approachable, helpful and human.

Social Media involves publishing of content by organizations about their products,

services, their upcoming launches and news which keeps existing and potential customers
updated which helps customers engaged with the organization and the brand which eventually
forms relationship among them resulting in loyalty. Organizations initiate multiple social
media marketing campaigns which have different kinds of creative attached like Images,
Videos, Podcast videos, Web URLs along with the text based content. Different kind of
creative engages with audience in different way. Videos performs best among the creative
types, followed by Photos and lastly the links which have great potential in increasing the
Impressions and therefore increases potential of higher visibility and improved branding of
the organization.

It is becoming challenging to reach out to target audience through traditional digital

marketing options such as E-mails due to GDPR in all countries of European Union as it is
illegal to send sales email to EU citizens without their consent. GDPR has eliminated one of
the largest regions on the planet for making any potential contact and therefore, marketers are
having hard time in finding leads. Social Media has no such limitation and anyone can
connect to its followers as well as connections on the platform as much as they like without
worrying about any GDPR related issues. Moreover, there are no cost overheads for Social
Media publishing which is in the case of E-mails whenever mass e-mailing solutions are
subscribed for, for press releases which costs a lot as well. Therefore, Social Media is the
most optimized way to establish and maintain a communication stream with the customers
which is available 24x7 and costs nothing so it can be adopted by Startups, SMEs, Large
corporations.

Internet penetration is rising across the world and social media platforms now have billions
of users making social media a marketing channel of choice. With more activity on social
media, any business can build a strong following of their brand which would make it
affordable to reach out to customers and announce any product and services related updates
on real time. Businesses around the world should therefore choose Social Media as their
primary marketing channels besides having a website which would empower them by getting
a global reach at no cost.

Moreover, Indian businesses are highly benefitted with social media in terms of global
exposure and business leads which has made India a global outsourcing hub for Information
Technology related business and recently a leader in manufacturing segment as well.

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 Chapter – 1

Introduction

Social Media refers to internet based communication portals which facilitates the creation
and sharing of information such as ideas, subject focused information, opinions, facts and
other forms through virtual communities and forums. Social Media has become an inseparable
part of daily lives of billions of users. Businesses use it to reach out to their target clients and
audience, to promote their events, daily affairs, products and services while individuals use
Social Media to connect with their friends and family for friendly catch up and conversations
via text, video, audio. Social Media are essentially communication channels therefore if there
is a portal which doesn’t support communication then it is not a social media portal.

Some of the features of Social Media communities are:

1. They are Web 2.0 based applications which uses technologies such as HTML, CSS,
Javascript, API, and cloud based servers such as Amazon web services.
2. The communities are powered by user generated content in the form of text, images,
videos and users engage with each other’s content by liking it, commenting on it,
sharing it with their network.
3. Users can add their friends to their virtual network and people can also subscribe to
influencer’s profiles so that they can receive updates from them and further engage with
them.

Social media are web-based and can be accessed through mobile technologies such as
smartphones, tablets which makes the platforms highly interactive and can be used on the go.
Social Media platforms are used by organisations to collaborate by co-creating content,
brainstorm, share the content among each other.

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 Social Media on Management –

Social media monitoring tools are increasingly being used which allows corporations and
marketers to search for all the ongoing conversations that takes place around the brand and
topics of interests, track and analyze them. That helps in setting up optimized advertising
campaigns, marketing campaign effectiveness and return on investment tracking, calculating
the share of voice of all the competitors and what kind of content is bringing in more
engagement which can give insights on optimal type of content, language, tone and creative
for marketing campaigns. There are social media intelligence solutions such as Sprinklr which
pulls millions of social media mentions data and analyses them to understand the origin of any
trend, sentiments around the trend, countries with most participation. Whenever any negative
comment is made on the social media platforms, these social media intelligence helps in
raising red flag and the commenter is engaged to understand the issue and further steps are
taken to fix those.

Different Social Media Services in an organization focuses on different aspect of the

functional building blocks of Social Media such as:

1. Identity of individuals – Users can reveal their identities on the social media platforms
as much as they like. Elements of identity such as name, gender, location are generally
revealed and depending on platforms it goes further to profession, current job title, interests,
age.

Facebook User profile LinkedIn User profile

2. Conversations – Through the means of social media, individuals can communicate

with other users which can be moderated and controlled by the social media platform. Social
Media platforms are primarily designed to facilitate conversations in a secured way among
individuals and organizations. One of the parties can publish content and others can extend
the conversation by interacting with the content by the means of liking, sharing the comment
which spreads the message further to several degrees of connections. The conversations can
take place on topics such as interests of an individual, causes such as economics,
humanitarian, political, environmental etc.

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 3. Sharing – Social Media facilitate sharing of message from one group to another in
almost real time. Social Media platforms supports sharing of content differently, it can be
exchanging the content among themselves, distributing it to extended network, share URLs of
the content. People meet on social media essentially to socialize and share.

4. Presence – Social media allows individuals and organisations to establish a virtual

profile, a persona of theirs which people can identify with. With the quality of profile created,
and content published, the reputation of the personal or firm either improves or declines.
Reputation is directly related to trust and therefore, if the person is perceived as a subject
matter expert, then the reputation on the platforms soars. High profile individuals and firms
have reputation management department whose job is mainly to improve the reputation by
means of interacting with followers, tackle any fake news, provide support if need to.

5. Groups – Users on social media platforms can form subject/ topic focused communities
where related topics are discussed by the community members. As the user count in a network
grows, so does increases the activities in the communities of the social media platforms
making the portals “Social” in true sense.

Every category of user uses Social Media platforms differently. Some use-cases are as
follows:

1. Social Media usage by Government – Government these days are proactively using
social media for real time communication with their subjects. Moreover, social media
gives them an opportunity to hold a two-way communication which leads to active
engagement and more trust. Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi live streams
his Podcast Mann Ki baat on social media platforms for real time engagement with
citizens of India.

• Government can monitor sentiments of the citizens by analyzing the opinions of

public on the social media platforms and can take suitable action.

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 2. Social Media usage by Businesses – With billions of users being actively using the
social media platforms, it offers a great opportunity to the businesses as now they can
achieve following:

a. Business leads – Marketers can form professional networks with different

stakeholders of the potential customer (business) and start engaging with them.
Also, marketers can target users of social media platforms by interests,
demographics such as gender, age, and professional status like Job Title, Skills,
Seniority while using paid marketing.

b. Hiring - Employers can look out for prospective hires by publishing their open
job openings on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and allow
applications from prospective employees who can submit their resumes. Also the
businesses can share content which expresses them as a employer of choice by
exhibiting the work culture and how is it fun to work in the firm.

c. Branding – Social Media gives a way to businesses to continuous push out

informational content to all the followers which increases visibility and thus
increases the brand recall. Moreover, businesses can use social media monitoring
tools to keep a track of all the ongoing conversations going on around business’
products and services to engage with people, gauge their sentiments and act
accordingly.

d. Real time communications – Businesses often wants to push out press releases
which mostly are to be pushed immediately. All typical form of communications
like press releases takes few days to weeks to channelize content across hundreds
of press partners. With social media, businesses can reach out to existing
followers of the brand immediately.

e. Customer Support – Every organization has a customer support team for solving
all sales/ support related queries. While has been systems like Business
processing operations (BPO) Call centers, Chat support centers, E-mail support,
Social Media based customer support are becoming more popular as they are real-
time, faster, cheaper way to solve queries and also every successful closure of
ticket mostly follows as a positive message on social media which enhances the
brand image of the business which acts as a testimonial.

f. Market Analyses – Every company wants to deal in a product and service which
has great demand in any particular market. That’s why social media is leveraged
highly as businesses using social media can explore the trending topics related to
any industry and products, to understanding the volumes of content published
around it which shows the popularity, what are the people talking about them, is
there any potential demand and is the topic being increasingly discussed or the
activity is dampening. If the intensity increases rapidly, there holds a great
opportunity to tap in by the businesses.

g. Web Traffic – All social media platforms are also digital marketing channels
which are used to drive in traffic to the corporate website. Website ensures that
the user is given all the information required and captures the user’s details.

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 3. Social Media data Mining – Large amount of social media data is analyzed by
businesses and agencies to identify the topics which are trending, what are the
sentiments around the topic, to correlate any future major events with the ongoing
trends, to make forecasts about trends. Financial firms analyses large bulk of companies
related data on social media to keep a track of all related news and to measure any
potential impact on the share prices. Gmail analyses the content of millions of emails

and shows related ads to its free users.

4. Social media in Politics – Politicians have started leveraging social media marketing by
data mining the profiles of millions of users and showing them ads related to their
interests. For example: People who are interested in social welfare may prefer parties
which supports socialism over capitalism, etc. Twitter is one such platform where
political discourses take place frequently.

5. Background verification – Personal opinion reflects the character and knowledge of a

person. For hiring in large firms, government positions, immigrations, social media
profiles are deeply scrutinized to build a persona of the personality of an user. If there
seems any content which appears to be alarming such as drug use or photos with
criminal, published some racist posts, the candidate can be rejected by the
organizations.

Social Media platforms comes in different forms with different sets of features. They
are as follows:

1. Blogs – Blogs have some elements of social media platform where users can publish
content which supports text, images, videos, emojis in the blog posts. Visitors can
subscribe to Author so that they can feed updates about new blog posts whenever any
new one is published. Examples: Blogpost, Wordpress, etc.

2. Discussion Forums – Forums are web applications where users register and post their
queries. Other forum members in turn posts their opinion to help the fellow forum
member. This peer to peer support interaction is archived for future reference purpose.
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 Gamification is implemented by giving points to members for every question and
comments they post. Some of the examples are: GMATClub, Stack Overflow, Quora,
GamesSpot, etc.

3. Business Networks – These are the platforms mainly for professionals where Business
professionals can engage among themselves to nurture professional relationships which
can help in finding job opportunities and potential business leads. For example:
LinkedIn, Xing, etc.

4. Photo Sharing – These are the platforms where users share their photographs with the
community and where community members can post their comments. Members can
subscribe to the famous photographers and can create custom albums of the photos they
like which further community members can explore, get inspired and comment on.
Examples: Flickr, Google Photos, etc.

5. Social Gaming – Gaming is one of the most popular ways to engage among teenagers
and that’s where multiplayer gaming portals comes into picture. Gamers can play
multiplayer games and live stream their game plays with community members which in
turn, comments and often donate money to support them. For example: Steam, Twitch,
Rainway, Remotr, etc.

6. Social Networking – These are the backbone of Social Network where millions of
users register themselves, add their friends, family members to their personal
connections, they post content in the form of videos, text, images, etc. and comments of
their connections’ content which leads to mutual discussions and that is how every user
stays connected with each other.

7. Video Sharing platforms – There are platforms which are specifically for video
sharing purpose. Videos posts videos of different kinds for example: Vlogs which are
video version of daily blogging, Live and archived Event/ Conference session videos,
Travel videos, etc. For example: YouTube, Periscope, Facebook Live Stream, Vimeo,
DailyMotion, Tik Tok, etc.

8. Images Sharing platforms – These platforms are dedicated to sharing Images

primarily with public as well as their followers only when the profile is in private mode.
For example: Instagram, etc.

With so many different types of social media platforms, it becomes easy to keep the user
within the ecosystem and these platforms are inter-connected so that the data flows from one
application to another. For example, one can login into Instagram using Facebook and
Instagram posts and stories can be shared on Facebook directly. That saves time of the user
and gives additional reach to the content published by the user.

Moreover, while vloggers shares the videos primarily on YouTube, they cross-post the
content on Facebook and Instagram as well so that they will get additional views and
engagement and they can drive the audience to the YouTube which is their primary platform
for video based content sharing.

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 Modern Social Media started taking shaping as early as 1994. Internet was slow and used
to be available through Dial-up connections. In 1998, ISDN connections came into existence
and further in 2000s when relatively faster internet was introduced that supported Web 2.0
applications, which made modern social media platforms to come in existence. The growth
journey of Social Media is as follows:

1. YEAR 1997 – A website called Six degrees came into existence which allowed users to
add friends, sign up using email address, set up individual profiles and post content. It
was operational until 2001.

2. YEAR 2002 – Another social network, Friendster came into existence which allowed
users to create user profiles, make new friends, add to their connections and further
share content in text, videos, photos form with their connections. The website
witnessed high growth and reached 3 million users.

3. YEAR 2004 – It’s when MySpace came into existence which introduced features like
adding friends, sharing content with them. Before that, there were no social media
platforms which let users do that. MySpace got over a million users in first year.

4. YEAR 2005 – Along with MySpace, YouTube also came into existence which is a
Video sharing social network. MySpace users grew 10 times to 20 Million, and
YouTube had 2 Million users.

5. YEAR 2006 – Reddit came into existence and got 250,000 users. MySpace and
YouTube witnessed strong growth rate and had 2.5x growth (54Million users) and 10x
growth (20 Million users). respectively.

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 6. YEAR 2008 – Facebook was introduced and could garner 100 million users in a year,
YouTube user base increased to 300 million users, Reddit increased to 2 million users,
and MySpace has 72 million users.

7. YEAR 2010 – Facebook users increased 5 times to 517 million users, YouTube has 480
million users, MySpace started witnessing a decline in monthly users and reached 68
million users. Twitter had 63 million users by that time.

8. YEAR 2012 – Facebook users count almost touched 1 billion making it one of the
largest social networks in existence, followed by YouTube users increased to 844
million users, Twitter was witnessing high growth rate of 160 million users, Tumblr’s
users increased to 146 million users, Wechat users increased to 118 million users.

9. YEAR 2014 – Facebook was witnessing unprecedented growth and touched 1.4 billion
users, YouTube touched 1.25 billion users, Whatsapp users increased to 500 million
users, followed by WeChat users which increased to 444 million users making them
some of the largest social networks of that time.

10.YEAR 2016 - Facebook continued to grow even more and had 1.75 billion users,
YouTube grew to 1.4 billion users, Whatsapp increased to 1 billion users, WeChat
increased to 800 million users.

11.YEAR 2018 – Facebook’s growth didn’t stop and it touched 2.26 billion users,
followed by YouTube which touched 1.96 billion users, Instagram and WeChat
increased to 1 billion users each. Tik Tok increased to 500 million users, Twitter
increased to 330 million users.

Criticisms about Social Media- Social media though connects users with friends and
family, it also connects users with unknown peoples who can have ulterior motives to connect
with. Moreover, they can be subjected to cyber bullying, cyber stalking where strangers tries
to track all activities of a target user. Spamming on social media has become prevalent and
large number of profiles are created using fake names and associations for promoting content

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 to target users and communities to which the spammers wouldn’t have been able to connect
otherwise.

Privacy in Social Media – Social Media users must be aware about the information which
can be gathered by people through social media platforms without one’s consent or
knowledge. The information can further be misused by creating fake profiles, misrepresenting
themselves online. Organizations can use data mining techniques to garner intelligence about
targeted individuals. For all these reasons, organizations these days does background checks
to confirm validity of individual’s identity. GDPR bill was introduced by European Union
which heavily penalizes organizations which they store the individual’s personal data without
consent from users and if they send sales emails to European citizens.

Globalization and Social Media –

As the usage of social media is increasing globally, the country border lines are blurring
and individuals and organizations are coming together to interact and transact among each
other. According to a study, over 70% of decision makers in the USA misses out potential
business opportunities available abroad.

Some of the ways by which global firms leverage social media and platforms:

1. Researching the market – Every social media platform has main audience only from
certain countries and therefore it becomes prudent to have presence in different platforms to
target different countries while keeping consistent messaging across the platforms. Twitter for
example is popular in UK and US, and therefore a company targeting Germany will use
XING instead which is popular among European countries. Likewise, to communicate with
Chinese clients, businesses will use WeChat instead of Whatsapp as WeChat is prevalent in
China.

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 2. Language localization – People around the globe prefer local language. Therefore,
Social Media platforms allows brands to publish content in country’s local languages which
increases the trust in the brand and makes consumer more receptive towards promotional
messages and delivers more unified customer experience.

3. Country specific content – Marketing earlier used to be just about spray and paint
approach without any change of messaging and localization as per the country. Scenario have
changed now and social media platforms allows brand to maintain location specific social
media profiles so that they can communicate with right audience all the time.

4. Geo-Targeting the messaging – Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn allows

publishing country targeted content organically which is relevant to any particular country.
That ensures relevancy and increases engagement rate on the content. It also means sending
any special messaging including promotional messages to a specific country is made possible.
Paid social media marketing campaigns in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter have the ability to
target any users belonging to a particular location, having specific interests (Facebook),
designations and Job Titles (LinkedIn), are following to specific users (Twitter).

Potential of Social Media in India –

India is one of the populous countries in the world having over 1.3 Billion people. With
over 55% of the population between 15 and 45 years of age, it becomes one of the youngest
countries making it extremely suitable for social media usage. With that, the social media
potential user base is in upwards of 700 million users in coming years. People are reducing
the usage of traditional means of communication and are becoming more tech savvy and
internet dependent and therefore adopting social media platforms as their primary mode of
communication.

With Internet data costs declining ever year since 2013, India has seen 40% growth in
number of internet users. There were 62 million social users in December 2012. 74 percent of
all the active Internet users are in urban parts of India. There were 80 million active users in
Urban India and 72 percent of the active users were active users of social media. Internet
users in December 2018 were 566 million. Out of them, around 293 million are active urban
internet users and 251 million users live in rural areas. Indian users on an average consume
8.3 GBs of mobile internet data every month which is higher than even china. Indians have
tendency of owning multiple mobile phones which has translated to over 1.2 billion mobile
devices in India.

With the introduction of Reliance Jio, all other mobile internet service providers have
reduced the costs by 90%, making more Indians to start using India therefore video
consumption on mobile devices increased many fold and user registrations on social media
platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram witnessed high growth. According
to McKinsey report, India will have 835 million internet subscribers by 2023.

Indian users use social media platforms for 18 hours each week, which is more than the
United States, China.

Social Media adoption growth in India has been very fast, with just 142 million users in the
year 2015, which rose 30% to 196 million users in 2017 and doubled to 259 million users in

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 2019. It is eying 15% growth to cross 293 million users in 2020 and 30% growth to 370
million users in 2022.

There are several categories of social media platforms which are operational in India and
caters to various segments of Indian businesses:

1. Content focused Social Media Platforms – Users in these platforms create content,
which is read, liked, shared by the users and connections of the user. Creating more content
helps in building a known brand by being consistently visible, providing regular stream of
information about brand’s services and products. Eventually if a user shares information
about a topic, the user earns a reputation of being a thought leader in the domain which
helps in getting speaking opportunities in conferences and business clients.

Some of the prominent content focused social media platforms running in India are:

1. Facebook – Facebook was founded in 2004 by

Mark Zuckerberg with a goal to provide a social
media platform to his university, Harvard which
further spread to other Ivy league schools
including MIT, Yale and Stanford. After steady
growth,
In 2006 it was made available for global audience.
The growth was unprecedented and it surpassed
the user base of MySpace. In the Quarter 4 of
2018, Facebook witnessed high growth in India in
terms of monthly active user base which witnessed
9% increase in MAUs. Facebook posted 52 percent
increase in revenues amounting to INR 521 Crores.
In the year 2015, Facebook had 135 million users
in India, which increased to 313 million in 2019

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 marking a growth of 100%. Facebook is suitable for B2C type of businesses and some
of the Indian organisations which have strong presence on Facebook are: Jumbo
Burgers, Micromax, Taj Hotels Group, etc.

2. LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a professional network which

is owned by Microsoft. LinkedIn was founded in 2002
with a goal to allow people to connect with businesses
as well as university contacts. In 2009, LinkedIn had
3.4 million users and it has grown 20 times to 62
million users.
LinkedIn helps businesses in finding quality talent,
building professional networks as well as finding
potential business leads. India is second largest market
for LinkedIn. This is suitable for B2B, B2C businesses
and some Indian companies which have presence on
LinkedIn are ZOHO, Tally, MakeMyTrip, etc.

3. Twitter – Twitter is a short messaging social media

platform which was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and was initially limited to 140
characters long messages which was further increased to 240 characters or less for
holding conversations. Being a versatile platform, it is used by businesses as well
individuals alike. Twitter is a real time platform where conversations can be started in
seconds. During the event of any major disasters, Twitter is a go-to platform for
everyone to investigate if there’s any tweet on any topic in past few moments. India has
34 million Twitter users India out of the total 330 million users world-wide. Some of
the Indian businesses which are active on Twitter are: Tata Group, Range Rover, Indian
Newspapers such as Times of India, Indian Express, etc., Wipro, etc.

4. Instagram – Instagram is an image-first platform where users and brands creates a user
profile and publishes images and videos which can be related to personal life of an
individual or to promote different aspects of the products and services to followers and
users of the platform. Since images are more appealing than text, the user-base is largely
youth and therefore an ideal platform for companies which have young customer base.
It is ideal for B2C companies. India has over 80 million instragram users out of the total
400 million global users. Organizations such as Marriot, Holiday Inn, Taj Hotels,
Parle-G, Indigo, SpiceJet, etc. uses Instagram to target their young audience aging less
than 35 years.

2. Chat based social media Platforms – There are applications which are only for one:one
and one: many communications. These are for real time communication and while
individuals communicate among themselves, the platform gives an opportunity to
businesses to interact with their customers by sending confirmation messages, asking for
feedback, giving them assistance through chatbots.

Privacy is strict in these platforms and they often provide end-to-end encryption which
can’t be intercepted by any hacker. Also, since the communication takes place between the
company and the individual, the reputation risk is minimal as they won’t be sharing the
content with the public as well as the conversation by default isn’t seen by anyone else but
the parties which isn’t the case when typical social media networks are considered.

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 Whatsapp – It is the most popular social media platforms which is essentially a Chat
application. Currently there are over 400 million Whatsapp users in India out of 2
billion users world-wide, making it most frequently used social media platforms for
communication. Businesses can have business/brand accounts and can also link the
accounts with Chatbots for automatic answering for support related queries. Major B2C
centric businesses use Whatsapp for sending periodic updates such as: MakeMyTrip,
OyoRooms, etc.

3. Specific purpose Social platforms – There are platforms which caters to only specific use
cases. For example: for exchanging business, finding matches for marriage, virtual checking
in into the travel destinations and users can interact with the ones they match/ interact with.

a. Trade platforms – There are platforms which are only for making trades such as
IndiaMart.com, TradeeMart.com where users can create their business’ profiles and
share all details about the products and services they offer. They can have their client’s
testimonials mentioned on their profiles for increasing trust among the users of the
portal and showcase themselves as leading seller. There can be different categories of
the products listed such as:

i. Softwares
ii. Computer Hardware
iii. Manufacturing of machineries
iv. Apparels

b. Marriage/ Dating related portals – In the modern times, a large section of urban
society doesn’t have time to find a partner for themselves in real life and that’s why they
choose online platforms which allows them to find a match according to their
preference – by looks, by education qualification, by profession, shared interests etc.
Platforms like JeevanSaathi, Shaadi.com, Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid are some of the
platforms which are widely used in India.
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 c. Travel and cuisines related discussions – There are platforms which are only for
discussing about travel destinations, to rate the destination, share feedback with the
community about the hotels, restaurants, food available in any part of the world. Some
of the prominent portals are Zomato, MyGlobalOdyssey, Tripadvisor, etc. Most of these
portal contains forums for holding discussions, articles to share travel experiences. Also,
one can create their own community driven camps and have community members sign
up for them.

Social Media Analytics – There are different types of engagement metrics which are
compared in order to evaluate the performance of a social media post. Following are the
metrics:

1. Likes – When users “like” a post, they engage with the post by clicking on the like
button. These days like buttons have included more specific emotions such as Love,
Like, Sad, Haha.

2. Shares – When user likes a post so much that they want others to read it, they would
“share” the post which causes the post to show up on user’s timeline as well as the
followers of the user also sees the post in their feed.

3. Comments – When user has an opinion on content published on the platform, they
would leave a comment which can lead to further discussions on the content.

4. Clicks – Whenever a post has a link within its content, the goal is to make more users
click on it. Every click on the link is counted by the social media platforms.

Custom Metrics for gauging performance of a social media campaign:

1. Engagement – It is the sum of the metrics Likes, Shares, Comments, Clicks which
further helps in calculating other custom metrics such as Engagement Rate.

2. Engagement Rate – It is the ratio of Engagement and Impressions which shows what
percentage of the users engaged with the content. The higher the engagement, more
relevant and exciting is the post’s content to the audience.

3. Click through Rate – It is the ratio of Clicks and Impressions and gives an insight on
how well was CTA designed or how important the click seemed to be to the audience.
High CTR is beneficial for any marketing campaign.

4. Engagement per post – It is the ratio of total engagement on all posts and number of
posts published in a campaign or a time period. This metric is compared with individual
posts to compare if the posts performed better than the average or not. Desirable
condition is to have posts having higher engagements than the average engagement
received on the posts of a campaign.

5. Impressions per post – It is the ratio of total impressions received and number of posts
published which is compared with individual posts to get insights on which posts are
performing better than the average. That can give insights on if target audience chosen
was right or if people are keen in looking at the post over and over.

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Above button refers to the Tweet’s Like
count.

Above button refers to the Tweet’s

Comment’s count.

Above button refers to the Tweet’s

Retweet’s Count.

On the right, we have a screenshot of a

tweet.

In the figure, we can see there were 612

impressions received on the post, and
there were 11 total engagement
received which consists of 7 clicks on
the creative attached, 2 detail expands
which means user clicked on the post to
view it in bigger format, 1 like – user
clicked on the like button once, 1 profile
click refers to the event where user
clicked on the author’s profile to view
details about the author of the tweet.

Engagement rate of this tweet can be

calculated by dividing total engagement
by total impressions received which is
1.17%

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 On the left, we have a Facebook post.

The post reached to 8 people and received no

engagement in form of likes, comments, shares,
clicks.

It shows that the post wasn’t very engaging and

therefore, focus should be made towards
increasing the quality of the content of the post as
well as to create meaningful assets in the form of
images, videos for the post.

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 Chapter – 2

Literature Review

Social Media is primarily about connecting people with each other over the internet
irrespective of their location, age, and other demographics. Over the years, social media has
proven itself as a great way to market products and services of a business to billions of users
that social media overall has. Businesses leverage social media platforms by broadcasting
their promotional, informational messages to firm’s followers, building and managing brand
presence and reputation, for finding new potential business leads, hiring new talent
irrespective of candidate’s location, providing customer support across and through all social
media platforms that they have presence on.

Fig. 2.1 Structure of Social Media Platforms

Author Review:

There has been considerable research which has happened on Social Media over the past
decade. Following are some of the studies on what is social media by some authors:

1. Sinan Aral, Chrysanthos Dellarocas (2013) reported that social media has
fundamentally changed the way humans and businesses communicate, consume,
collaborate and create the content which has led to business transformation in terms of
operations, sales, marketing, intra-organisation communications and other functional
areas such as finance and human resources. With advancement in capabilities and
features of social media platforms, full time employees are building flexible
relationships with remotely available talent for crowd sourcing and broadcasting new
ideas and to engage in outsourcing of ad-hoc tasks whenever required. With the
increased flexibility to exchange the expertise and knowledge among talent available in

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 different locations, the pace of innovation and development of new product and services
have accelerated.

2. Gaurav Seth 2020 reported that social media marketing has become a preferred
inexpensively marketing tool which facilitates communication between consumers and
businesses which makes consumers truly a kind as businesses make significant efforts to
keep consumers well informed about the products and services. Moreover, social media
channel allows to interact and gives opportunity to companies to fix the concerns of
customers which if completed successfully leads to building a solid as well as trustable
brand. Businesses have started shifting from traditional channels to social media
channels as a means to build stronger brand which help in generating higher ROI for
every unit of efforts made. Also, social media helps in analyzing the performance of
every post that is published on real time basis which is impossible in case of traditional
means of marketing.

3. Boyd and Ellison (2007) reported that social media platforms are web based services
which facilitates individuals in creating a public or semi-public user profiles within the
social media platform in order to communicate with the users of the portal, view the
content by other users, engage with content published by users. What differentiates
social media platforms from other means of social networking platforms are facility to
create user profile, post comments, highlight interests, likes, dislikes and maintain a
personal and professional brand by regularly creating content.

4. Shubhangi Bhardwaj (2018) reported that social media have emerged as a critical way
of communication and have molded the public opinion in masses and appreciating them.
Social media gives users an opportunity to hold conversations two ways and in which
content sharing has become the center piece. Social media is accessible on both mobile
as well as web based platforms and gives an opportunity to 243 million to connect with
millions of global social media users.

5. Rama Rani (2014) reported that social media is an internet utility to assist in social
interaction which encompasses social communication among individuals which are
separated by ideologies and geography. Users of social media uses various features of
social networking sites such as forming new virtual friendships, sharing information and
knowledge, real time communication.

6. Nielson (2012), reported that internet users have continued to spend more time on
various social media platforms than any other types of websites. Also, the time spent on
mobile devices have rose 99% while on desktops, it has reduced by half. Facebook
stayed as the favorite social media platform among youngsters. India has largest chunk
of young population which has made India a prime market for Facebook.

7. Mangold and Faults reported that Social media platform are a hybrid piece of
promotion mix as in the traditional sense it facilitates organisations to talk to their
clients but in non-traditional sense, it basically facilitates organisations to communicate
with one another directly. Social media has allowed people to stay connected with their
loved ones while enjoying one’s lives smoothly.

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 Different Social Media platforms serves different category of businesses well. Some of
the categories of businesses are:

1. Business to Business (B2B) Segment – Businesses which have other businesses as

their clients falls into B2B Segment. In this, one business offers products and services to
other organization. Social Media gives an opportunity to B2B Businesses to connect
with their target audience i.e. working professionals working in an organization by
sharing insights about the industry, sharing product and services related information,
sharing benefits, features and different aspects, some of which may interest the target
audience. Over the period of time, the audience starts following the user profile of the
vendor and whenever they get sure about the stability and reliability of the vendor, they
engage with the content and starts engaging with vendor’s posts on social media which
may eventually result in filling up of form by target audience and thus a business lead is
generated through the social media.

2. Business to Consumers (B2C) Segment – Businesses are normally perceived to be an

organization which caters to the needs of individuals. These kinds of businesses fall in
B2C category. Social Media platforms typically have millions of individuals as user and
which becomes an opportunity for businesses as now they can segment the entire user
base as per the requirement and start targeting the audience in their marketing
campaigns.

How Businesses choose and adopt social media platforms –

According to a Whitepaper by Cognizant, every organization goes through multiple stages

in order to adopt any social media platform as a part of their digital marketing channel.

From the first stage Initiation to the final stage Assimilation, large organization identifies
its needs, which requires a robust framework that would monitor the ongoing trends and
conversations on social media, measure them, analyse them and based on the data, strategies
are formulated based on the insights gathered from the collected content from social media
platforms. That helps in formulating a social strategy which is eventually integrated with the
firm’s business requirements.

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 Initiation – In this stage, the organization identifies all the social media platforms which
would be relevant for the business to reach out to the target audience. In the case of
financial institutions such as banks, the target audience is everyone who is over 18 years of
age and therefore platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram works the best.

Observations - Once the platforms are identified, the platforms are listened to and
monitored to understand the kind of conversations which takes place, communications
which are done by the customer as well as customers of the competitors which helps in
getting insights on the interests of theirs and what kind of products and services they may
look for, also, what kind of problems are they facing which the firm may cater to. By
listening to multiple communications at once, a detailed persona can be created and
therefore, there will be enough information for personalization of services and offers in
future.

Involvement – After getting the insights from the conversations going on in the platforms,
the business may start engaging with the target audience by sharing a lot of informational
content around the business’ domain, industry, products and services which can make
consumers more informed which helps in brand and trust building. When the content turns
out to be interesting one, the consumers may share the content with their extended network
on the platform which helps in reaching out to more prospective audience and can result in
more business. Therefore, by engaging with existing and prospective clients can be a
fruitful exercise.

Assimilation – Once the business has monitored the conversations and engaged with the
audience, they can integrate the insights received from the processes to form a 360 degree
profile on the customer relationship management software which helps in understanding
what kind of products and services they may look for, what kind of offers would they be
interested and accordingly personalized offers will be released to them. By using social
media analytics, we will be able to evaluate what kind of content is resonating with them,
what kind of creative should be used for marketing communication for audience of same
personas.

By following the above steps, businesses are able to integrate new social media platforms
within their digital marketing channels effectively.

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 Growth of Social Media worldwide v/s growth in India -

According to the report by eMarketer (2013), about one in four humans globally had
access to social media platforms which got changed to one in three in the year 2019.

That shows how fast is the growth of social media adoption globally.

Some of the regions which witnessed high growth rate of social media adoption are :-

Asia-Pacific – In the year 2011, it had 501

million users which increased to 1231 million
marking growth of 120%. Some of the highest
contributing countries in the region were
China, India, Indonesia, Japan.

Latin America had over 151.6 million social

media users which doubled to 324 million
users in 2017.

Middle East and Africa witnessed growth of

120% - from 123.2 Million users to 324.4
million users in 2017.

North America witnessed growth rate of 40%

which is a lot less comparatively. It had 163
million users in 2011 which increased to 203
million users in 2017.

The reason why social media adoption rate

isn’t increasing much in American and
European region is that they were the early
adopters of social media and it has already
reached its peak in terms of penetration.
India witnessed highest growth rate of all the
countries and regions. India had only 54.8
million social media users which increased 5
times to 282.9 million users in 2017 and is
forecasted to have 376 million users by 2020
marking growth of 650% since 2011.

India have embraced and realized the potential

of social media and the user penetration within India has risen from 22% in 2017 to 27% in
2020.

According to a research by Jacob Poushter, Rhonda Steward (2018), social media is

rising in developing countries but the growth has halted in the developed countries. Main
reason which is contributing to this is Australia, Canada, USA, Sweden, UK, Germany,
Netherlands have upwards of 85% internet penetration while India is undergoing the
digitalization phase and only has 25% internet penetration across India.

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 According to a report by Cognizant, Social Media helps in making customers data stored in
Customer Relationship Management more granular and complete. Companies can now keep a
track of social media accounts of the users to understand their interests, their sentiments and
activities – the data which can be utilized in providing more personalized services to the
customers.

Risks in Social Media –

According to a report published by Cognizant (2013), Organizations such as Banks

requires highest level of data security. Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council
(FFIEC) launched its guidelines for financial organisations, how different existing laws,
policies and regulations are applicable in purview of social media.

Reputation risk is an important aspect when it comes to any influential person or a brand as
social media is something which can help make brand a strong well known and it can also
equally assist in defaming and destroying one.

According to a report by Deloitte authored by Henry Ristuccia and Michael Rossen,

social media websites have become a source of ever-evolving useful information on existing
and prospective customer and other target stakeholders with a focus on their experiences,
attitudes and opinions rather than just being a platform for chatting and holding casual
discussions. Board members must be aware about how social media affects the reputation in a
positive as well as negative manner. A survey conducted by Forbes stated that 80% of 300+
senior executives and board directions focused on reputation risk as a business challenge as
companies’ attribute more than 20% of market and brand value to reputation. Dissatisfied
vocal customers can become a threat to reputation of a firm. Social media gives them a
platform to express their grievances to global audience in manner of seconds. Therefore,
businesses must grow along with customers in this fast paced and complex environment to
tackle all incidents wherein customers bad mouth about the company. Some other challenges
involved are brand damage, legal and regulatory compliance, employee/ HR issues where
disgruntled employees write inaccurate information about company, security and privacy
threats where critical and confidential data is shared on social media platforms.

To tackle such reputation risks, leadership must take forward looking approach proactively,
wherein they must know where to look for potential threats and problems, how to analyse and
categorise them as per the potential risk, how to move forward addressing and further mitigate
any potential risk. Businesses must continuously search for potential complaints on social
media and find ways to interact with users to solve/ share the remedy. If hundred such
complaints ends up targeting a business, it may lead to reputation risk.

Tom Andreesen and Cal Slemp, Protiviti (2011) reported that employees often access their
personal social media profiles from the company’s internal server which may subject them to
data privacy risks. The social media users revealed the following behavior:

1. More than 60% of the users on social media clicks any link that the contacts or group
members share on the platform without knowing where does the link leads to. There
will be an alarming threat if the link leads to a phishing webpage which can steal user’s
information.
2. 45 percent of the social media users have been a victim of internet based viruses and
malware infections

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 3. 30 percent of the users have shared important documents over the social media
platforms.
4. 50 percent of the users allows their colleagues to use their machines.
5. 20 percent of users have witnessed instances of identity theft wherein fake profiles are
created on social media websites which can lead to online frauds.

Some risks which business are subjected to while on Social Media:

1. Compliance Violations – It is important that the confidential data or any kind of

sensitive data mustn’t be shared over the social media which can violate compliance
requirements.
2. IP Data Loss – Some information is strategic in nature, for example: some new product
launches which are being develop, details of which are held secretive. Therefore,
employees mustn’t share any information about them over the social media platforms.

3. Reputational Loss – Any slanderous remark and distasteful comments by disgruntled

employee and customer can cause negative perception about the organization which
must be contained.

4. Financial Loss – Employees must refrain from sharing any performance related matter
on social media before the information is made public by the company itself as that can
lead to insider trading as well as the stock prices may get prematurely impacted.

5. Safety Loss of individuals – No private information related to for example travel of

any senior leadership be made public before it has successfully concluded as that can
lead to compromising situation and the person’s safety may get impacted.

Social Media Guidelines to mitigate risks -

Since employees demand to have access to their personal social media profiles, companies
must analyse and address the risks involved. Clear Social media policies must be prepared and
established which is applicable to entire organization which is further vetted by the auditors to
assess compliance with the policies. Regular trainings should be organized to educate the
employees regarding the best and safe practices to use social media.

Business purpose of using social media has to be cleared among the stakeholders which
becomes a guiding principle for all social media activities and that helps in evaluating if
current policies are enough in both alignment and scope with focus on marketing, information
security, and external communications.

Company must evaluate how social media is applicable to the policies by asking questions
like:

1. What are the policies the department has?

2. Are the policies effective and efficient?
3. Who monitors the policies and how are they monitored?
4. How frequently does the policy get updated?
5. What are the potential risks which are not addressed by the policies.

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 Above questions can help in crafting a social media policy which assists in planning the audit
and risk assessment procedures and what are the steps needs to be taken and implemented.

Social media in India

Digitalization in India picked up rapid pace in last decade after broadband became a norm in
urban households. The internet penetration picked up speed when Reliance Jio was introduced
in 2014 following which all mobile operators reduced the price of Internet packs by 90%
making India home of cheapest internet on the planet.

Smita Sharma (2018) reported that Boston Consulting Group and Internet & Mobile
Association of India co-published a report called India@Digital wherein they mentioned that
Internet economy would be worth USD 200 billion by the year 2020 which would 5% of the
total GPD of India.

According to the report by EMarketer, over 70% Internet users uses social media platforms
such as LinkedIn, Faebook, Twitter, Instagram for having interaction with their friends, peers,
relatives.

According to a report by IAMAI, over 90 percent of the social media users in India are
Facebook users. Besides the metro cities, 1/3rd of the social media users live in cities having
less than 5 million population and rest 25% lives in cities having less than 2 million
populations. Over 70% of the social media users use mobile devices.

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 Successful case studies from India –

As reported in Digital Vidya Case Study (2015), Gaana.com is a music streaming service
which was launched by Indiatimes in the year 2010 which had repository of a million songs in
21 Indic languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, etc. Since youth loves to listen
to music, music lovers loved the idea of using an indigenous music app. Gaana leverage
Facebook as its social media platform which helped in pulling millions of users from urban
and rural parts of India. By introducing advertisements in between streaming of music, they
would monetize and meet the required return on investment. Gaana app targeted its potential
audience by capturing the interests from Facebook and showed them ads related to the songs/
singers user had in their interests section of profile. That resulted in higher engagement rate
on ads leading to even low advertising costs on Facebook.

Some of the achievements were:

1. The cost per app installation was 20% lesser than any other marketing channel.
2. Since the day of targeted ad promotion, there was over 200% growth in app downloads.
3. Total reach across PAN-India crossed over 35 million in few days making it highly
scalable way of marketing.

Therefore, Social Media could help an Indian business in reaching out to millions of unique
targeted audience and bring them on board as a user in few week’s time.

Impact of Social Media on Banking Sector in India

Dr. P. Balaram Babu, CH Mohan Babu (2018) reported that with over 800 million youth
population which largely is employed, India’s banking sector is highly optimistic about the
industry’s growth in India. Therefore, banks are taking initiatives to using social media
platforms in order to tap into the millions of user base of these platforms and brand
themselves among the youth as a reliable banking partner. Indian has over 300 million mobile
users, making them a great prospective customer for mobile banking services. Indian banks
are proactively innovating new banking solutions targeted at young Indians and therefore
mobile wallets were launched. To increase the adoption, hundreds of social media campaigns

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 were initiated to target the urban as well as rural population and as a result, market value of
mobile wallet transactions has increased to USD 28 Billion in 2019, up from .25 USD Billion
in 2012.

To ensure the best banking practices and security procedures are followed by the young
banking users, a lot of informational content is shared by the social channels of banks which
makes user a well informed customer and builds trust over time.

According to a report by McKinsey & Company, the young customers switch their banks
because of emotions and sentiments attached. Therefore, to stay connected with them, banks
need to share branded articles and insights, content related to savings, and other topic of
interests which youth can connect to. If the users find those relevant, they would share the
content within their network as a result they will become a brand evangelist on social
platforms which is a win win situation for the banks.

Banks also take endorsements from social media celebrities/ social media influencers to tap in
their follower base which is often in hundreds of thousands to few millions and helps in
making the content go viral in very short period of time and instantly the goodwill earned by
the bank from the followers.

Banking sector believes in measuring the return on investment and therefore, every effort
made through on social media marketing can be measured, analyzed, and ROI can be
calculated almost immediately after successful conclusion of the marketing campaigns.

LinkedIn Post Twitter Post

As we can observe, ICICI bank is sharing informative posts on social media so that the
customers as well as people who follows ICICI Bank’s social media profiles stay informed
about various services as well as security measures which makes everyone an informed user.
Content which are informative and beneficial are shared mostly by the audience which
helping in brand awareness and brand building without spending any capital.

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 Chapter -3
Research Methodology

3.1 Introduction

In the globalized economy, global businesses are flourishing at rapid pace. One of the factors
which has facilitated this growth is Social Media. With interconnected world, the billions of
people are just a click away who are the potential customers of thousands of global
businesses.

India is the home to largest youth population and with high rate of internet penetration and
social media adoption, the Indian businesses will find themselves a great opportunity to be
able to reach millions and spread awareness about their products and services. India has
witnessed 550% growth in social media adoption in last 7 years making it fastest adopter of
social media which is on the way of becoming a digitalized economy.

There are different types of businesses in India – B2B, B2C, C2C having operations in
different industry verticals such as Engineering, Information Technology, Chemicals,
Hospitality, Travel and Tourism, etc. and therefore it becomes prudent to understand how
global as well as Indian businesses are leveraging the power of social media and what kind of
improvements can be made in adoption of social media by businesses to eventually contribute
to the growth of GDP of India.

3.2 Objective

This study is a research study into the use of social media by Indian businesses wherein we
will evaluate what kinds of businesses are there in Indian business ecosystem, what social
media platforms are they already using, what would be the optimal social media platforms for
the businesses, what kind of creatives are they including in their social media campaigns, how
well are the social media campaigns performing v/s the global standard. The results of the
survey and research would contribute in better understanding of social media adoption and
implementation in Indian business ecosystem.

The survey sample consists of 77 Indian companies out of which 34 businesses are of
Business to Business B2B Category, 34 are of Business to Consumers B2C Category and 9
belonged to Consumer 2 Business category which are freelancers, contractors. The survey
includes businesses which are from all major cities of India to get a diversity of opinion in the
research. Also the businesses have some tangible social media presence which will help in
comparing the performance and effectiveness of social media platforms. 33 respondents
directly managed the marketing of the firm and 44 respondents weren’t managing the
marketing efforts directly.

To evaluate the performance of social media channels, the survey is followed and different
insights related to Indian businesses is sourced and we tried to understand which social media
platforms brought in superior results for which category of businesses (B2B and B2C).

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 3.3 Survey Methodology

The research study which was conducted included both primary as well as secondary research
to prepare this report. Primary research was done by surveying the set of professionals who
are located across India and they could share insights about how marketing function of their
organization leverages social media for marketing efforts.

Secondary data sources helped in gaining a deep and comprehensive understanding of how
social media is helping global and Indian businesses in terms of outreach, how does different
social media campaign looks like, how does the growth of social media vary in different
countries. A survey was undertaken in which there were 1047 respondents aged between 18-
64 years to identify the popular social media platforms as used by Indians.

The research process included methodologies such as sourcing data from publication research,
surveys, interviews in order to to collect data and information to assist organisations in
making informed business decisions.

Primary research techniques –

1. A web survey was conducted which had 77 representatives of Indian businesses and
they are presented with a list of questions which were in the form of Single choice
questions, multiple choice questions, Range selector, enter the input.
2. Respondents were required to classify the industry of their business such as:
a. Manufacturing
b. Information Technology
c. Engineering
d. Human Resources
e. Finance
3. Respondents had to select their business category out of the following options:
a. Business to Business
b. Business to Consumer
c. Consumer to Business – Freelancers
4. Organizations from all over India were considered to ensure that there is no geographic
bias or limitation in the data points.
5. No leading questions were used.
6. Clear precise and short questions were asked in the survey to make comprehension easy.

Secondary research techniques –

1. No specific techniques are required as the data is already well conducted and researched by different
agencies and therefore focus is made on collecting and collating the required information from credible
sources which consists of research journals, business magazines, trade association publications. All of
the referred resources are included in the bibliography.

2. There are multiple objectives which we have attempted to meet and therefore multiple published
resources are referred to and data validation is done to fixate at the numbers.

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 Chapter – 4
Data Collection & Analysis

4.1 How Social Media is being used by global businesses and different use-cases for social media

Social Media is accessed by every one in three persons in the world and therefore, with this increased
exposure various advantageous situations have resulted for global businesses. As per the
survey conducted in December 2019, there were .97 Billion social media users in the world

which increased about 300% resulting in 3.21 billion social media users spread across 240
countries of the world. That grows the tremendous potential which social media has and how
social media has become an integral part of lives of humans.

According to the survey conducted by Statista in January 2019 where 4,859 markers were
interviewed for the different purposes for which social media is used, following were the
insights which we received. Following are some of the key benefits every industry
professional expects out of their social media marketing campaigns:

1. 93% of the respondents voted for Increased exposure making it the top voted reason
for social media marketing. That translates into brand awareness which helps in staying
in the minds of target audience in the desired geography.
2. 87% of the respondents use social media marketing for bringing in an increased traffic.

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 3. 74% marketers who responded use social media for generated business leads and
improved sales.
4. Brand loyalty is of focus for 71% of the respondents.
5. Over 56% of the marketers use social media for growing the corporate business
partnerships, promoting the thought leadership wherein subject matter experts shares
their industry insights with business’ followers.

According to a survey taken from 294 professionals by Ascend2, following were some of the
most important objectives which are part of social media strategy:

1. Increasing the audience engagement is the most preferred objective by 64% of the
respondents.
2. Increasing brand awareness is second most important objectives voted by 54% of the
marketers.
3. Increasing lead generation is voted by 41% of the respondents.
4. Increasing traffic to the website is voted by 35% of the respondents.

According to a survey conducted by Oracle in which 500 business representatives responded, following
were some of the major ways social media is used:

1. 72% of the respondents use Social

media for recruitment and talent
acquisition.

2. 69% of the respondents use social

media marketing for branding
which includes engagement with
the prospective and existing clients
as well as spreading awareness
about the firm with them.

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3. Businesses these days invest a great deal of time in branding themselves as employer of choice and
therefore 68% of the businesses use social media for recruitment branding.

4. 63% of the businesses’ use social media as one of the marketing channels.

5. 57% of the businesses use social media for external corporate communications and public relations.
Social Media effectiveness is very important to evaluate specially after making a lot of efforts. The
following survey was taken by Oracle to understand what objectives were met with social media in
satisfactory way and which ones didn’t.

According to 60% of the respondents, Social Media served as an effective platform for external
communications, 30% of the respondents were neutral and only 11% of the respondents claimed social
media to be ineffective.

For brand awareness, 57% of the respondents claimed social media to be effective and 25% had a
neutral opinion while rest 18% claimed social media to be ineffective for improving brand awareness.

Social media was effective in increasing the effectiveness of marketing for 55% of the respondents
while for 15% respondents it was ineffective.

4.2 Reasons why social media as a marketing channel witnessed high adoption rate
and Advantages of Social Media

With increased penetration of Internet, people needed a means through which they could stay

connected with their friends and family while meeting other professional and personal goals.
Social Media became a versatile platform which has over a dozen use-cases making it the
single platform to do it all. A survey of 9000 professionals was conducted by Social Strat
and following were the learnings:

1. Majority (55%) of the respondents use social media for consuming news and
information which is global, real-time and fresh. That helps in staying up to date with
major things that are happening around the globe.
2. Humans by default loves to network. About 44% respondents voted for professional
networking being their one of the reasons to use social media platforms.
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 3. Social Media was designed to share useful content with the network. About 40% of the
respondents marked exchanging of information with peers as one of their purposes of
using social media.
4. A large population of social media users are students. About 33% of the respondents
use social media for research purposes which can be both academic as well as
professional.

4.3 How businesses in India are using social media

A survey was conducted by Statista where 1047 people responded and following are some of the major
activities which Indian social media users perform:

1. Majority of the respondents (86%) uses social media for instant messaging with their friends,
colleagues.

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2. 86% of the respondents also uses Social Networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc to stay
connected with their friends and family.
3. 49% of the users uses social media for sharing images and videos such as Instagram, etc.
4. 43% users use social media for business/ professional networking using platforms such as LinkedIn,
etc.
5. For 41% of the Indian social media users, blogging is one of the reasons why they use social media.

77 Indian businesses were surveyed and following were the observations :-

1. For spreading awareness about the new products and services, 44% of the total
respondents which belonged to B2B uses social media, 42.55% are the B2C businesses
and 12% are freelancers.

2. Social Media is used for long term branding by the total audience out of which 53%
respondents were B2B businesses, 35% were B2C Businesses and 11% were
Freelancers.

3. To get more business leads, businesses use social media platforms. Out of the total
respondents, 42% were B2B businesses, 42% were B2B businesses hinting that getting
additional business has balanced demand.

4. For B2C businesses even customer service/ support was also one of the important
objectives for using social media. If businesses start interacting with the customers on
social media platforms and if they manage to solve the queries as per the expectation of
client, it can lead to a win win situation for both the company as well as the customers.
That leads to long term relationship with the client which increases the life time value of
the customer and the business may receive more business through worth of mouth
promotion by the customer.

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 Some of the prominent social media platforms which are highly used by Indian social media
users are:

1. YouTube has the highest penetration among Indian population which is used by 82% of
the total social media users in India.
2. Facebook is used by 76% of the total social media users making it second largest
platform by users.
3. WhatsApp has become one of the most widely used chatting social media platform used
by 70% of users.
4. Instagram is used by 64% of the social media users in India, mainly aged between 15 and 35
years.
5. Some of the other prominent social media platforms which are highly preferred by the
population are Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, SnapChat most of which have specialized audience
and purpose. Facebook is the most neutral platform which meets need of everyone.

4.4 To understand the features and usage of different social media platforms and how they relate to
different types of businesses (B2B, B2C) in India.

As per the survey done by Statista, Indian businesses have started embracing Social Media.
Some of the businesses which have got massive fan following in India are Vodafone Zoozoos
India which falls in the category of both B2B and B2C categories and has 19.24 million
followers, making it the largest business Facebook pages which is followed by State Bank of
India which is both B2B and B2C serving business, is a financial institution and is also the
largest banks in India. It has 18.3 million followers on its Facebook page.

Hyundai India which is mainly manufacturer of consumer cars is very popular automobile
brand and has 12.47 million Facebook followers. Shoppers Stop is one of the shopping
destinations which is loved by every fashionistas and has 10.74 million followers. Airtel India
is the largest mobility solutions providers in India and has over 10.72 followers on Facebook.

All of these brands operates at PAN India level and are loved by their customers. Thanks to
the social media platform, they can reach out to their followers within minutes making social
media a boon for external communications.

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 Different platforms are useful for different category of business as their user base is different
and so are the demographics and intrinsic traits of the audience. Therefore, it becomes prudent
for every business to choose their marketing channels carefully. From the survey which was
conducted of 77 businesses, following were the outcomes:

1. For B2B type of businesses, 45% of the respondents claimed that LinkedIn brought the
maximum traffic to their websites followed by Facebook (35%), YouTube (13%),
Twitter and IndiaMart (3.23%).
2. For B2C Businesses, the best platform which resulted in maximum traffic was
Facebook (48%) followed by Twitter and LinkedIn (16%), YouTube (13%) and
Instagram (6.45%).
3. For Freelancers, the best platform for bringing maximum traffic to their portfolio
website was Facebook (33.3%) followed by YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram (22%).
4. Overall, Facebook resulted in maximum traffic to the website (40.85%) followed by
LinkedIn (30%), YouTube (14.5%), Twitter (8.5%).

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 Major key business drivers for Indian Businesses:

1. Facebook drove the maximum overall business for companies which responded to the
survey. For B2C segment, 43.75% of the respondents, for B2B segment, 37.5% and for
freelancers 18.75% of the respondents vouched.

2. LinkedIn worked equally well for B2B and B2C businesses driving in more leads for 43%
of the respondents each, and brought rest 14.8% of the leads for freelancers.

3. YouTube although a pure video focused platform, it brought in maximum business for
B2C businesses and 36.6% respondents claimed that YouTube resulted in business leads.

4. Twitter performed well for B2C businesses as 33.33% respondents claimed to have
received business through Twitter, followed by B2B businesses where 30% of the total
respondents received business through Twitter and rest 20% business was sourced by
freelancers.

5. Instagram performed well for B2B businesses as it resulted in business for 44.4%
respondents which were B2B businesses and rest B2C (33.3%) and freelancers (22.2%)

Therefore, it is important to focus on businesses which are statistically performing well for
category of business as social media platforms are just tools and channels and each of them
have their set of peculiarities.

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 Chapter – 5

Research Findings

5.1 Social Media in India

Social Media Growth in India

Social Media is a young country and is witnessing highest growth of social media and internet
adoption in the world which has opened great business avenues for India. India has added
more than 40 million internet users between Oct’ 13 to Sep’ 14 marking a growth of 20.5%.

India is a developing economy which always needed a growth stimulus. Social Media has
given India a way to promote its local businesses PAN India as well as on the global level
which means more and more businesses have started creating their business profiles.

As per the prediction by PWC, India’s share of overall media and entertainment spend across
APAC region will rise from 4.9% in 2013 to 6.5 in 2018 which would be facilitated mainly by
social media.

India has observed the CAGR of 11.2% between 2013 and 2018 marking as fastest growth
achieved by any other country.

Facebook being the largest social media platform in existence, it has found business use-cases
very promptly. In India, it has more users than in any other country, making India a very
important market for Facebook. In India, there are 260 million users which is more than
United States (180 million) and United Kingdom (37 million) combined.

For Twitter, India has seventh largest user base with audience size of 11.8 million. United
States has the highest number of users at 59 million followed by Japan which has 45 million
and United Kingdom has 16.7 million users. Twitter being a micro-blogging site is used by all
kind of stakeholder, whether it is an individual or a business, an NGO, a celebrity,
government departments, News and magazines, etc. Twitter is a real time mode of
communication which can be used for creating hype about any trend or an event like
conference where the audience can tweet about on-going sessions to engage with fellow
audience and network with them and form connections on the go.

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 Fig. Twitter Users world-wide

LinkedIn as the leader for B2B marketing in India –

LinkedIn resulted in 45% of the total traffic from social media platforms to the business
website giving a hint on how relevant is the audience on LinkedIn which primarily consists of
business professionals who are looking for networking and any possible mutually benefiting
business opportunities.

For business to consumers businesses, LinkedIn brought 16% traffic to website which means
B2B is the main purpose for LinkedIn and therefore, B2C segment should ideally create
content which would interest the business professionals.

Facebook is the king of social media -

Facebook is the top choice for marketers when it comes to Business to Consumer segment of
business. According to the survey which was organized, 48% of the total web traffic which
came from social media channels came from Facebook. It hints that when we have individuals
as prospective customer then Facebook should be marketer’s choice as a social media
platform.

Twitter is the neutral platform and good for all kinds of audience –

Twitter has all kinds of

users, whether they are
businesses like Audi, BMW,
Boeing, Tata Hotels,
Samsung, LG, or world
leaders such as Donald
Trump, Narendra Modi,
Pope Francis, or B-Schools
such as Harvard, NMIMS,
Yale, Wharton, Twitter acts
as a minimalistic micro-
blogging platform for
engaging easily with anyone.

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 Businesses choose Social Media after completing the initial checks

Every activity is well planned when any changes are made at firm level. Therefore, Businesses
follow the Social Media Adoption cycle. In that cycle, first of all the social media platforms are
listed which are then monitored actively for a quarter of the year to understand what kind of
audience is there, are they talking about the brand or the business or business’ competitors. Any
of which helps in deciding whether the monitoring efforts should be continued.

If the business finds enough of the relevant content and target audience on the social media
platform, then the business may start building a brand profile on the platform and start sharing
the content on the platform with the focus on building follower base.

Enough follower base would ensure that company has immediate potential reach which helps
in external communications and sharing updates about new product launches which can be
targeted to only social media users as well. That incentivizes the audience which is already
connected with the business on social media and therefore, other customers who weren’t
connected earlier with the brand over social media will now start following the brand which
results in increased follower base of the brand.

This helps in becoming a thought partner as well as industry leader. Eventually the company
will integrate the social media platform in its main digital marketing channels and that’s how a
social media platform is chosen and made part of its digital marketing strategy. That journey
can take few quarters to complete and every action and step is well researched and thoroughly
planned by the marketing team and the leadership.

Indian Social Media ecosystem is a gold mine for businesses

Social Media is growing every day in India as the population is young, and Internet is cheaper
than ever. Some key statistics which works in favor of Indian businesses which wants to
promote their businesses over the social media without spending large capital are:-

1. There were over 213 million internet users in the year 2014 out of which 130 million
were mobile internet users. By 2020, it is going to be 354 million.

2. Over 75% of the social media is accessed by social media and there are 505 million
smartphone users in India.

3. There are 260 million Facebook users which is great for B2B, B2C businesses as well as
Startups of all sizes who wants to attract global audience while being in India.

4. There are 63 million LinkedIn users which is second largest user base for LinkedIn. For
businesses which wants to target business professionals as well as global businesses for
deals and business leads should consider targeting LinkedIn audience.

5. With such abundance of over 300 million audiences available to be reached out using the
social media platforms such as YouTube, Pinterest, Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn, the
opportunities for business growth and partnerships are endless.

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 Chapter – 6
Recommendations and Suggestions

6.1 Future aspects of Social Media

It is assumed that 31% of the Indian population would be using social media by 2023 which
means there will be higher internet penetration and more scope of business avenues over the
social media.

Therefore, following are the recommendations for Indian businesses:

1. Start using Social Media – It is important for businesses of all sizes whether they are
large corporations, Small and Medium Enterprises or Startups, they must have social
media presence and therefore, their brand accounts.

2. Create Social Media relevant to category of Business – Indian businesses should focus
on social media platforms which has their desired target audience. For example: If the
business is B2C centric, the ideal platforms would be Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,
Twitter, etc. while for businesses which deals in B2B segment, LinkedIn should be
primarily social media platform and others like Facebook, Twitter should be good as well.

3. Create a lot of content – It is important to regularly post content through social media
channels as more content will give chances for content to be seen by the followers and
therefore more informed they will be.

4. Engage with customers and target audience – Businesses should actively engage with
customers by replying to their comments, thanking them for their likes, shares. That ways
customers will feel good and engaged and they will be more likely to engage in future.

5. Monitor Social Media Channels actively – Business should actively monitor social
media channels for any conversations which are taking place about their products or
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 services or even related to their domain. Businesses can then pitch in and try to provide
some value by sharing some relevant information.

6. Solve customer’s problems over social media – Businesses should address any queries
that customers may have and if they reach out to business through any of the social media
channels. That helps in getting a positive feedback from the customer and the testimony
stays online which helps in brand loyalty and trust building whenever someone sees the
conversation.

7. Use hashtags for content discovery – Using relevant keywords in the content which is
published on social media proves to be extremely useful for content discovery as then the
content piece will show up in the search results whenever an user will search for any
particular hashtag to check out conversations going on.

8. Analyse the social media performance – Marketing actively is only one aspect of social
media marketing. Another important aspect of social media marketing is to measure the
social media campaign performance to identify which content performed well compared
to other posts and to which content did the audience engaged the most.

9. Prepare social media guidelines for stakeholders – Since there’s always a reputation
risk when social media is actively used for marketing activities. Therefore, it is important
to have social media guidelines for all employees so that they refrain themselves from
posting any content which may end up in creating a compromising situation for the
employee, employee’s colleagues or even the firm.

10. Conduct Social Media training for employees – Employee advocacy is an important
aspect of social media marketing wherein employees actively shares content of and related
to the firm on the social media marketing which helps in widening the reach of firm’s
informational social media messages to even wider audience and also increases chances of
receiving more follows. Also if employees continue to share content related to a particular
domain, audience starts perceiving them as a domain expert and a thought leader.

11. Research your target audience well – Spray and paint used to a marketing technique
when enough research in marketing domain wasn’t done. Now since there’s abundance of
user base on any given social media platform, it becomes important to stay strategic with
time and efforts and therefore, company must research its target audience beforehand, on
which platforms will be the target audience be, what’s their age, gender, interests, all of
that helps in crafting the content as well as targeting through the tools given by platforms.

12. Gauge the sentiments – It is important to monitor the conversations going on on the
social media platforms and also to assign and gauge the sentiments of each of the
message. Furthermore, to get a sense of overall sentiment, all the content pieces are
analysed which gives insights on if customers are happy with business’ and competitors’
products or services or not. Accordingly, the relevant actions can be proactively taken by
the company.

13. Continue to build brand on social media - Social media is not a sprint but a marathon
and it takes years to witness any fruitful results. Therefore, companies must have at least
three years of horizon in mind for continuing the strategic efforts on social media
marketing.

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 Annexure

To understand the usage of social media in Indian firms, I had conducted a survey
on Social Media usage among Indian SMEs and Corporations and I have utilized
convenience sampling method. To gain insights on different firms uses social
media, I prepared a set of questions which can give us insights on what are the
social media platforms which are used by what type of organization and if paid
campaigns are also set up to increase the reach of the campaigns further.

In this survey, there were 77 submissions, out of which 44% were taken by B2B
Businesses, 44% by B2C and 11.7% by B2C businesses which gives us a
balanced outlook of popularity of social media platforms among Indian based
businesses.

Following are the results of the survey.

Fig. Surveys taken by different business categories

Q 1. What were the Industry Verticals of the organisations which got surveyed?

Response:

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 Conclusion –

27% of the respondents were from Engineering domain including Aerospace, AI,
Analytics, Chemicals, Defense, Telecom, Life Sciences domains, 24.68% were
from Infirmation Technology Industry which included Big Data as well, 10.38%
belonged to Human Resources domain, 14.29% belonged to Healthcare and
Pharma sector and 9% belonged to Finance and Insurance sector.

Q2. Do you handle marketing for your organization?

Response -

Conclusion –

43% of the respondents handles the marketing of their organization actively, while the other
57% respondents have entered the responses as per the observations they have made, they
have sourced the information from their organization to get better understanding of how
social media fits in the organization as a marketing channel.

Q3. What were the primary objectives behind the usage of Social Media Platforms?

Responses -

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 Conclusion –

34% of the respondents use social media marketing for creating awareness about the new
products and services that the business offers, 31% focuses on long term branding of the
organization while 22% of the respondents use social media to generate more business leads
and 9.4% respondents want to drive in more traffic to their business’ websites.

Q4. Which of the following Social Media Platforms are you using for your business?

Responses –

Conclusion –

LinkedIn is used by 44.12% Business to Consumer (B2C), 41% Business to Business (B2B)
businesses and 14.7% Freelancers, making LinkedIn a platform of choice. Moreover,
LinkedIn is a social network for professionals and therefore chances of building business
networks and getting business leads is easier on LinkedIn.

Facebook is popular among Business 2 Consumer businesses with 45.7% preferring

Facebook, 42.86% of respondents belonging to B2B category uses LinkedIn and 11.8% of
respondents belongs to C2B category mainly for brand building.

Twitter is a micro content platform and is used by 47% B2C and 43% B2B businesses
making it truly a great platform for brand building and spreading awareness about the
business. About 9% businesses are C2B and it helps them showcase their portfolios to the
world.

YouTube is a video sharing platform which is used by businesses out of which 47.8%
belongs to B2C category and 43.4% belongs to B2B category making it a defacto choice for
sharing video based informational content. About 8.7% businesses are C2B – Freelancers
which showcases their video based portfolios through YouTube.

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 Instagram is an image sharing social media platform which is popular among B2C
businesses with 58% share, 31% of the businesses are B2B.

Q5. Which of the following drives most traffic to your website?

Responses –

Conclusion –

Facebook brought in maximum traffic to the website for 37.7% of the total respondents,
followed by LinkedIn (27.3%), YouTube (13%), Twitter (7.8%). Facebook being the largest
social media platform with over 2.4 Billion users has huge potential for all kinds of businesses
and is a goldmine for B2C businesses. Therefore, B2C, B2B businesses should start creating
more content for Facebook and LinkedIn to receive tangible visitors from these platforms.

Q6. Which of the following results to most business to your company?

Responses -

Conclusion –

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 30% of the respondents stated that Facebook resulted in maximum business to their
organization followed by LinkedIn which brought business for 28.2% of the total businesses,
12% from YouTube and Instagram and Twitter brought business for 10% of the businesses.
LinkedIn being a hub for business professionals and Facebook being a hub of global audience,
both should be prime social media platforms for B2B and B2C types of businesses to achieve
maximum efficiency in social media marketing efforts by the organisations.
Q7. Do you perform "Targeting and Segmentation" before starting the marketing campaigns?

Responses -

Conclusion –

It is important to target and segment the audience before starting the marketing campaigns to
stay relevant in terms of messaging. About 72.7% of the respondents target the audience as
per the business’ offerings which helps them achieve optimal results out of their marketing
efforts. About 9% of the respondents adopt spray and paint approach hinting that the business’
stage is not matured ones and more likely a Freelancer.

Q7. You have started paid campaigns in which of the following Social Media platforms?

Responses –

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 Conclusion –

About 55% of the respondents didn’t start any paid social media marketing campaigns and out
of the ones which started the paid marketing campaigns, about 22% used Facebook paid
campaigns, 6.5% LinkedIn paid campaigns, 3.9% used Instagram paid campaigns which are
often clubbed with Facebook paid campaigns and only 2.6% paid campaigns hinting that B2C
segment is very popular for paid promotions on Facebook and Instagram, B2B uses more of
LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook Paid Social media campaigns.

Also, we can include that Indian businesses are more expense averse when it comes to social
media as compared to traditional paid advertising where all kinds of businesses spend money.

Q8. Which of the following ways you use for analysing the social media activities?

Responses -

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 Conclusion –

44.7% respondents access the native analytics tools offered by the platforms – which are
easier to interpret as basic visualization is offered by the social media portals. Over 40%
respondents don’t use any analytics tool at all for evaluating their social media marketing
efforts and about 14.5% respondents exports the analytics data from all social media
platforms that they use and imports in visualization software like Tableau for generation of
reports for higher management.

Social Media Analytics is mostly focused upon by businesses which have reached the matured
stage of social media adoption. For that reason, the marketing team focuses less on analyzing
and focuses more on producing more content. Moreover, large amount of marketing analytics
data is required for analyzing and therefore only businesses with tangible social media
presence makes the efforts of using a dedicated visualization software for analysis.

Q9. What's the percentage of marketing budget which is spent on Social Media Activities?

Responses -

Conclusion –

81.3% of the respondents have 0-25% of their total marketing budget allocated to social
media activities and only 16% respondents have more than 25% of the budget for social
media which hints that there’s huge potential of growth to use social media for business’
promotional activities. Moreover social media hasn’t reached the matured stage in terms of
organic usage and therefore, there’s lack of awareness among businesses about potential of
social media for businesses.

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 Q10. Will you be continuing the usage of Social Media platforms?

Responses -

Conclusion –

81.8% of the respondents are keen in continuing the use of social media platforms and
perhaps after releasing the potential and impact of social media marketing on business, they
would perform more activities frequently so that their social media marketing practice may
mature over the time. 14.3% businesses still need to understand social media in much better
way and to start seeing social media as a long term game with branding be a prime focus out
of the activity.

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