ShareChat is the largest Indian social media platform that allows users to share their opinions, record their lives and make new friends – all within the comfort of their native language. Spearheading India’s internet revolution, ShareChat is changing the way in which the next billion users will interact on the internet.
Palkush Rai Chawla, Product Head- Monetization, ShareChat, talks on native language content, innovations on monetizing the content.
How has native language content first approached helped attract a diverse audience on the platform?
The kind of content we consume is a reflection of our cultural identity. In a country like India, our cultural identity is heavily tied to the language we speak. English is a requirement to grow professionally but it could never become the language of choice for the majority of Indians.
Back in 2015, India had never seen a social media platform of its own. There were social media platforms existing but all of them were in English and were complicated. Indian internet users found it tough to be expressive in English and also, connect culturally. There was a content vacuum in the Indic language space and ShareChat was created in order to address that need.
Indians feel comfortable interacting in their own native languages. Our songs, our movies, and our memes – everything is more identifiable and has a deeper emotional impact if it’s in our native language. By aggregating content according to languages, ShareChat was able to engage users who otherwise wouldn’t find relevant content online.
Whether it is a young college student watching viral videos, or a middle-aged salaried official sharing devotional messages on their family groups on WhatsApp – everyone would find what they were looking for on their personalised ShareChat feed.
What are the types of innovations offered by the brand to cater to the brands?
We work closely with brands to understand their marketing and advertising needs. Our reach, penetrating local regions helps us convert brand’s marketing messaging into engaging relevant content and ad formats which are native to ShareChat language-first feed.
We have an in-house ad solutions team which works closely with brands to co-create technology-led innovations like in-feed games, creator contests with camera effects, IPL scorecard branding, shoppable videos, scratch cards to issue coupons, to name a few.
These ad-tech solutions integrate the brand’s messaging seamlessly and are successful in delivering it to the relevant target audiences.
How has the platform helped the home-grown businesses to widen their reach not only to tier 2 and tier 3 geographies but also getting language-first users across metros and Tier I cities?
There is a misconception that language-first users reside mostly in Tier-2 and Tier-3 geographies. In fact, around 30% of ShareChat’s users come from Metros and Tier-1 Cities.
With a massive user base in South Indian cities like Bengaluru, Chennai, Coimbatore, Thiruvanantpur, etc – ShareChat has helped brands like Airtel, Paytm, Snapdeal, Flipkart, and Amazon expand their reach within many cities by running brand promotions in Indic languages. The campaigns resulted in generating higher brand awareness and recall as proven by independent brand studies on the platform.
What is the approach for AI-enabled solutions offered by the platform to the brands? How are they benefiting from the same?
Since ShareChat users are heavily engaged (31 Minute/user/day) on the platform,We are able to collect a lot of clean data signals which are leveraged to draw insights about users’ behaviour.
We have built sophisticated targeting variables which help brands slice our massive user base into relevant audiences based on their interests, shopping habits, purchasing power, etc. We also use these user insights to train AI-enabled models and improve relevance of ads shown to our community. We’ve already made massive strides and are able to deliver better Click-Through Rates (CTR) than industry benchmarks. We are in the process of building AI-models to help advertisers optimise their spends for downstream conversion events like Install, Video Completion, Signups, Purchase, etc.
What are the steps taken to ensure content moderation on the platform?
We have a strict content policy, which not only restricts obscene content, but also curbs violence, hate speech, fake news, abusive posts among other sensitive content categories.
In order to moderate the massive-inflow of user-generated content, ShareChat has built an AI-assisted content moderation pipeline, where every AI-flagged / user-reported content is human-reviewed before it gains traction on the platform. This is taken care of by our dedicated platform health team which oversees user reports and content moderation (inhouse and outsourced) 24×7.
What are the focus areas for monetization and what role do the influencers /content creator play to achieve the same?
Our primary focus area for monetization is to play the role of a match-maker between brands and our user community. We want to help Bharat users discover new experiences, services and products and bring in a transformation in their lives. Our content creators and influencers play a key role in this function. We’re empowering superstars of Moj to lend their voice to brands and natively integrate the brand’s message in their content, which has a massive organic reach. This combined with content activation placements helps brands achieve virality and reach millions of users within and beyond ShareChat in a short span of time.
