India’s advertising market is in the midst of digital spending boom, with recent news suggesting increased spending on formats like video will help push overall investment in the country’s online ad sector to more than $1 billion by 2017.
But where will Indian advertisers allocate their digital dollars in the years to come? According to June 2016 research from Social Beat, the answer might be social media. When asked about the digital marketing tools and tactics used for brand marketing, more than 88% mentioned social media marketing, beating out other tactics like search engine optimization, content marketing and email marketing.
When asked about the most popular social platforms, the majority of the country’s brand marketers focus their efforts on Facebook and Google. Based on Social Beat’s survey, more than 89% of India’s marketers used Facebook, while more than 78% used Google.
Other well-known social platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, while still popular, trailed Facebook and Google by margins of 20 percentage points or more.
The increased focus on social media marketing is not surprising given the rapid growth in India’s total audience of social network users. eMarketer predicts the country will have more than 206 million social network users in 2016, with audience expected to increase by 20% or more through 2017.
