The number of internet users in India has increased rapidly and specifically, the number of social media users has grown exponentially. It is estimated that over the period of (2012-2016), the social networking users in India rose from (68.1 – 216) millions and by the end of 2017 it is going to touch 250.8 million. Of all social networking sites, Facebook enjoys a huge user base of 195.2millions (by the end of the year 2016) and India stands first in the Facebook user count surpassing the USA. This showcases the sort of bond that has evolved between the Indians and social media in an impulsive way.
Social Video the top the Social Media Trend
It is observed the video content is taking a huge share of 80% of the overall internet traffic. In a similar way, the video content has taken a storm in the social media too. Social media adoption of the video content (including live streaming) has changed the overall business logic and escalated the revenue scales with the sky as the limit. Right back in 2014 only Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg stated that “in the next 5 years, most of the FB will be video”. The result of which is seen on Facebook having eight million viewers every day.
This scenario is no different in the case of YouTube. It is observed that close to six billion hours of video are watched monthly. Moreover, YouTube is ranked as the second largest search engine and one-sixth of overall internet users do watch YouTube. YouTube has a viewership of close to five billion videos in a day and 41.2 million active users every month (1st Quarter, 2016).
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According to Google:
YouTube’s total viewing duration has grown 80 percent over the past year in India with 55 percent of YouTube’s watch time coming from mobile devices and hours of content uploaded from India growing by 90 percent. On YouTube, entertainment-related content (film, TV and music videos) continue to take the lions share, contributing 90 percent of viewership on the Top 100 YouTube channels. Education and health-related videos are growing and likely to be the future growth drivers on YouTube.
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Strong integration of social Networks and Online Video platforms
This huge video content consumption though appeared to be a boost to the revenues of video content creators, but a huge percentage of revenue shares are being taken by the platforms to host the content. It is known that YouTube takes close to 55% share of Ad revenue, this is the major concern of video content creators. This lead in raising of players, who gets your own video platform. The major problem here is finding the viewer base. This urge developed strong mechanisms to integrate online video platforms with the social networks. This very thought also constituted to the increase in video activity of the social networks.
Analyzing this need of content creators for video platform and social networks, Facebook is planning to launch video platform for companies where they can all their services like live streaming, VOD, OTT and so on. In this process, Facebook is in plans to buy Netflix. In regards to this, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that “Goal with this platform is to provide a place that’s going to show [users] all the content that they’re interested in,”. Also, Facebook is in plans to integrate Virtual Reality experience to enhance the video experience to the users. In this process, Mark Zuckerberg has already acquired virtual reality company, Oculus Rift.
This move of Facebook for sure is going to be a revolution in the Video business. Specifically, in India, the high-speed data for reduced costs and increasing smartphones usage, is going to provide an impulsive raise in the video consumption trends.
Social Video: The key logic of Digital marketing and branding
The most significant factor is, maximum social media traffic share comes from the mobile devices. This shows how India with close to 220 million smartphone users has triggered the social video consumption to greater heights. This, in turn, projected a greater opportunity for the advertisers to capitalize the smartphone user market. The effect of which made Twitter declare that it is going to do a share of 70% Ad revenue to the video content creators, whereas the YouTube does only 55%.
Figure: Top most Social media objectives
These stats provide a way for these social networking sites to project themselves to be a global platform for innovative minds to present their ideas and their achievements in the form of videos. Such social networking videos came as a great solace even to promote social events or causes. The effect of this resulted in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to state that 8 billion video views have been recorded per day and this is equal to the 1/3rd income of Facebook.
The rise in the usage of social media based videos has triggered the ad and branding industry to invest more in this field, irrespective of the challenge in. The projections on social network led and branding expenditure, by the 2017-year end, is expected to stretch to $35.98 billion. The biggest challenge in this lies in locating right set of the target group of customers and management of groups. This enabled the scope for marketing and branding companies to look over something like Social CRM and Commerce. It is believed that nearly 8,000 small to big firms advertise through Facebook.
Conclusion:
This trend for sure is going to create great careers for the innovative and creative minds in social media marketing. All you need to be is be creative in creating content and innovative in promoting and distributing content to create branding and marketing for the enterprises.
