Social Media is important for marketers in India

3G service launch wouldn’t have come at better time, the cricket world cup and impending IPL-4 in India.  Cricket is the only religion, which binds this huge and diverse country together. Earlier also, whenever we were traveling or working in office and unable to get the latest cricket match scores, we used to immediately reach to our mobile phones for help. Till few years ago, this device was supposed to provide facility of voice data transfer from one location to another, but with 3G service launch and stupendous growth in Smartphone and social media enabled mobile phone's, sales it has become an auxiliary facility. Telecommunication revolution in India is a incredible story. As per TRAI reports, as on February 2011, total mobile subscribers in India stands at 752 million and projected to have 1.159 billion mobile subscribers by 2013.

Mobile usage behaviour has also undergone tremendous change. Couple of year back, I had written an article for a website, where I was impressed with increase in SMS as mode of communication. Then, as per TRAI data, an Indian used to send average 29 SMS every month.   Now, I was reading another piece of information published by Indiabiz News & Research Services (INRS), which says 30% of the youth access networking sites through their mobile phones rather than sitting before laptops, netbooks and desktops. I am also one among them, who can’t move without his Blackberry.  At the same time, SMS has not lost its importance.

With such a huge market, immense possibility has come up for the marketers for horizontal telecommunication convergence. Telecom Media Convergence is about companies crossing multiple industries and not being restricted to their own market. Convergence is the combination of all these media into one platform. It is the merger of telecom, data processing and imaging technologies. This convergence is taking us to a new era of social media, in which voice, data, images and video are combined to render services to the user. With more than 100 channels and cluttered TVC space, consumers skipping TV commercials, high TVC cost, rapidly changing media behaviou of Indian consumers, their changing preference in   mode of communication from voice calling to social networking, SMS and of course the latest entrant video calling, which was earlier possible through laptops and desktops only, will definitely see lot of dynamism and challenges thrown in front of marketers to reach their target consumers. The unifying factor among different mobile operators, different states, and different languages will be social networking websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut, Twitter, and YouTube. Although, social media marketing is still in nascent stage here, but huge possibility and corresponding challenges to take the communication across to users will make marketers consumers, although challenges will be no less tough, or rather it will be huge. Imagine the challenge of managing, mass of niches in diverse country like India. Some may pity on poor fellow called marketers, but challenges will give adrenaline rush to the true blue marketing warrior and through numerous success stories and case studies.

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