SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES AND INDIA

When Amitabh Bachchan writes something in Blog it becomes cover story of

magazine and news paper. When Bachchan joins Twitter it becomes breaking
news “Amitabh is now on Twitter” .When Sashi Tharoor use terms‘cattle classes’
and ‘holy cows’ on twitter it becomes big controversy. Kareena kapoor is seen
promoting facebook on her T-Shirt in a reality show. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook,
Orkut, Yahoo! Pulse and many more, it’s all there show in emerging India. The
social networking phenomenon continues to gain steam worldwide, and India
represents one of the fastest growing markets at the moment. More than 33
million Internet users age 15 and older in India visited social networking sites in
July, representing 84 percent of the total Internet audience. India now ranks as
the seventh largest market worldwide for social networking, after the U.S., China,
Germany, Russian Federation, Brazil and the U.K. The total Indian social
networking audience grew 43 percent in the past year, more than tripling the rate
of growth of the total Internet audience in India.
Growth of Top 10 Social Networking Markets Worldwide
During the old days when teens spent July 2010 vs. July 2009
Total Worldwide – Age 15+, Home & Work Locations*
hours alone in their rooms or with close Source: comScore Media Metrix
friends dancing in front of the mirror, Social Networking Unique Visitors (000)
playing outside their houses, trying
different outfits and modeling around the Jul-2009 Jul-2010 % Change
Worldwide 770,092 945,040 23%
corner; trying on different personas in United States 131,088 174,429 33%
person is out, the web deletes the middle China N/A 97,151 N/A

man. Now, there are a variety of online Germany 25,743 37,938 47%
Russian Federation 20,245 35,306 74%
social media applications to enable Brazil 23,966 35,221 47%
communication between adolescents. United Kingdom 30,587 35,153 15%
Due to the ego-central natural of these India 23,255 33,158 43%
France 25,121 32,744 30%
applications, social networking sites allow
Japan 23,691 31,957 35%
adolescents to extend their true South Korea 15,910 24,962 57%
personalities
Social network to thecan
sites online world while
be defined as web-based services that allow individuals
toalso addingaonto
construct them.
public or semi-public profile in a bounded system. One can
articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection and also view
their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature
of these connections may vary from site to site.

is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc.,

which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to
send and read other users messages called tweets. Tweets are publicly visible by
default , however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. Users
may subscribe to other author tweets – this is known as following and subscribers
are known as followers. Twitter is ranked as one of the 10 most visited websites
worldwide and 5th in India. As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets are posted
each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter.

Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004 that

is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc., with more than 500 million
active users in July 2010, which is about one person for every fourteen in the
world. Users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their
personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join
networks organized by workplace, school, or college. It has registered a record
growth of 179% this year in comparison to last year in India.

is a web based document-sharing website which allows users to

post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its
iPaper format. Scribd was founded by Trip Adler in 2006.

 isan image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite,

and online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo!. In
addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal
photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they
embed in blogs and social media. In September 2010, it reported that it was
hosting more than 5 billion images.
 is a social networking website that is owned and operated
by Google Inc. The service is designed to help users meet new friends and
maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google
employee Orkut Büyükkökten. It is the second most popular social networking site
in india after facebook as have 19,871 thousand visitors this year till july.

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in

measuring the digital world, released a report on traffic to Social Networking sites
in India, revealing that Facebook.com grabbed the number one ranking in the
category for the first time in July with 20.9 million visitors, up 179 percent versus
year ago. Facebook.com posted an especially strong month in July, growing 12
percent versus June, to capture the top spot in the category with 20.9 million
visitors. Orkut ranked second with 19.9 million visitors (up 16 percent vs. year
ago), followed by BharatStudent.com with 4.4 million visitors (up 3 percent).
Twitter.com had the highest rate of growth among the top five social networking
sites, increasing 239 percent to 3.3 million visitors. Yahoo! owned two of the top
ten social networking sites: Yahoo! Pulse (3.5 million visitors) and Yahoo! Buzz
(1.8 million visitors).
Top Social Networking Sites in India
July 2010 vs. July 2009
Total India – Age 15+, Home & Work Locations*
Source: comScore Media Metrix
India Total Unique Visitors (000)
Jul-2009 Jul-2010 % Change
Total Internet : Total 35,028 39,562 13
Audience
Social Networking 23,255 33,158 43
Facebook.com 7,472 20,873 179
Orkut 17,069 19,871 16
Bharatstudent.com 4,292 4,432 3
Yahoo! Pulse N/A 3,507 N/A
Twitter.com 984 3,341 239
LinkedIn.com N/A 3,267 N/A
Zedge.net 1,767 3,206 81
Ibibo.com 1,562 2,960 89
Yahoo! Buzz 542 1,807 233
Shtyle.fm 407 1,550 281