Introduction to Social Media

Hello Friends, welcoming you to LearnVern. My name is Nitin Jain and I have brought in for you a very powerful program on social media.

Friends, do you know at what scale or level has social media reached?

Millions and billions of users today are using social media.

Are you one among them? Are you also active on social media?

Come friends, let us see all of these in our today’s session.

Let us begin with the definition of social media. What according to you is Social media?

If i have to define it in one line, then those websites or the mobile apps that enable you to create content, share that content or participate in an ongoing content.

So, in a nutshell, I will define it as: any website or mobile apps that helps you to create content, share content or participate in content can be termed as social media.

So let us know more about such leading social media platforms.

The first social media platform is Youtube. This terminology is very well known to almost all.

Youtube is the most popular social media platform in India as well as in the entire world as this is the most commonly used platform.

The primary focus of Youtube is videos. If you like video content then youtube is the definitely best social media platform for it. In this platform, you get all the content may it be related to entertainment, food and even tech. Here, we have youtube creators, youtube consumers and also users like you and me.

The next media giant is Facebook. Facebook is the world’s largest social media giant. And, as on date we also have a lot of apps in it.

The third social media platform is Instagram. A couple of years ago when Instagram was launched, it was more commonly known as a photo social media platform. But nowadays Instagram has become a sensation among youngsters, teenagers, and even office goers. This is primarily used on a mobile phone. It also has a desktop version but the majority of them say around 90% of the users use Instagram on their mobile phones.

The next social media platform is Twitter. Twitter is majorly used for on the go, like for breaking news, weather reports, live reports like test cricket match scores or any other sports. Basically to share the live updates, twitter is widely used. The most important concept here is of hashtag which we will be looking at in the upcoming session.

Moving on to the next social media platform and that is LinkedIn. LinkedIn today is the professional social media platform. Like on Facebook and Instagram we connect with friends, similarly on LinkedIn we connect with companies, corporate and the HR recruiters.

If we are self employed then we look out for business expansion opportunities on LinkedIn.

So LinkedIn is a very important networking platform. This is an important platform for students and job seekers. As on date, recruiters are highly active on LinkedIn.These days the recruiters visit the job seeker’s profile on LinkedIn prior to conducting their interview as a part of the screening process.

The next 3 platforms that we are going to talk about are very important messaging platforms.

Like Whatsapp, which as on date is very common in all smart phones.

The next emerging social media’s messaging platform is Telegram.

And then there is the messaging platform of Facebook which is commonly known as Messenger.

And the last is the most important social media messaging platform and that is Snapchat.

So friends, let us see how many people in India are making use of social media platforms. As you can see from my screen, the total population of India. And before moving on to this let me share the source of this information. This data has been sourced from a company named hootsuite. Hootsuite today is one of the leading social media platforms of the world. This company also focuses on social media analytics. Every year this company presents the data of social media users and digital media users in its annual report. This report gets published in the month of January every year.

So here I'm presenting to you the data of January 2021, that time the population of India was recorded as 1.39 Billion and out of these 1.39 Billion, approximately 1.10 Billion people have active mobile connection. Out of these 1.10 Billion people, 624 million people that is approximately 45% of the population has an access to the internet. Many are able to access the Internet, either from their mobiles or from their desktops or from any other medium but these many people are connected to the internet.

Now out of these 624 million users, approximately 448 million users as on date are active on atleast one of the social media platforms. If I have to talk in terms of percentage of population then I would say that approximately 32 percent to be more precise 32.3% percent of the population are active on social media platforms.

Come on, now let us move on to our next slide. This slide will enable you to see and understand the speed at which the users are increasing on social media. Here, I would like to share a very important point that all these statistics that we are going to cover in our today’s session is very crucial from the recruitment’s point of view. Any recruiter at the time of interview may question you about the number of users of Facebook, number of users on social media platforms. So it is imperative that you know all these statistics.

Let us talk about Digital Growth that is Digital Growth on Social Media. As you can see from my slide that the total population increased by just one percent, the mobile users increased by two point one percent which brought to an increase of 23 million mobile users. Internet users, that is the users who are connected to the internet, if we compare 2020 with 2021, then we see that close to eight percent users have increased over 2020. Which means an increase of 47 million internet users. And then there are the social media users, as you can see it is the highest among all the 4 statistics, the maximum increase has happened in social media users of approximately 21 point 2 percent which is close to 78 million new users who have accessed social media in 2021.

This statistics shows the inclination users have today towards social media. That these users want to consume the content from this platform, that they want to be active on social media platforms. Thus these platforms are going to play a vital role even in the near future.

Let us further dive deeper to understand that these users, that is the users of India use which of these platforms more often. Whenever I’m referring to the term “media”, I am referring to a lot of media like television media, could be print media, or it could be electronic media, or even could be digital media. So out of these media, where are the users spending more time on, is a topic that we need to understand.

So let us again relook at the slide and as you can see “Time spent using the Internet”. So close to 6 hours is getting spent. Before moving on, I would like to share that this survey was conducted on an age group between 16 years to 64 years.

So as you see the internet usage is approximately 6 hours and 36 minutes. Next if we move on to Television then the usage is 3 hours 16 minutes. Then if we check out the social media usage then it is close to 2 hours 25 minutes, thus people are spending 2 hours 25 mins approximately on social media platforms.

Then the time spent reading press media that could be either online or physical print or even both comes out to be 2 hours and 26 minutes.

The next media is music streaming, which is again emerging these days. People are using apps like gaana, spotify for this. If we talk about the past, people used to download the songs on their smartphones, but such times do not exist any more. As people today are using mobile music streaming apps like spotify, gaana and this trend is booming faster.

Now if we talk about the last 3 media, the time spent by people on Radio is just 48 minutes, and has drastically gone down. Then people are also using Podcasts, and as we see its about 1 hour and 8 minutes being spent here.

Last is the media that is growing faster and that is online gaming through console or online and as we can see close to 1 hour and 20 minutes is being spent by the users.

With this we end our today’s session. If you have any questions or queries, please log on to our website forums.learnvern.com and post your question on that forum. Our team will try to answer your questions and resolve your query as early as possible.

What are we going to learn in the next unit?

We are going to look at:

The speed with which social media is penetrating the Indian Market,

The use of social media on smartphones is increasing day by day.

Also we will be looking at the most commonly used social media platforms. Not only that, we will also understand why one should use social media.

We will be looking at all these topics in our next session.

 Till then, Stay Tuned.

Good Bye.