REPORT 2016

Evolution of Social Media Page 2

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Page 6

Page 7Page 9Page 10

Page 13Page 14

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Page 17Page 18

Growth of Social Media in AmericaGrowth of Social Media in APAC Region

Social Networking Trends Across PlatformsChanging Dynamics of Social Media in India

Social Media: Brand Engagement

Twitter Q&ATwitter CameraElloShotsLive Streaming: Facebook Live and Periscope

Vine VideosSnap Chat

“Twitter influencers are challenging friends to inluence purchase decisions”

Formation of CrowdculturesAcross Platforms

How Users are Engaging On Social MediaSocial Media Engagement and Growth: A StudyDigital Media Spending

Brand and Celebrity EngagementCelebrity EngagementThe Rise of Influencers

Introducing Yral DigitalSocial Media Moving Forward: Growth and Opportunities

Subcultures: Art Worlds:

Table of Contents

Evolution of Social Media

Active social media users grew at 15%, since 2015“ “

With the launch of Facebook back in 2004, people got exposed to a new way of communication. The audience experienced a 'global village' kind of syndrome and got access to communities earlier restricted by geogra-phies.

Hence across the globe, users could instantly communi-cate and interchange ideas, concepts, and values at a single click. Replacing its predecessors like Orkut, Face-book was able to create a social media platform binding communities across the world. Fast forward to 2016, social media channels moved from the personal to the professional and ideological spaces. From being just a pass time, it evolved into an industry with a massive user base, having the potential to be explored and utilized.

TOTALPOPULATION

URBANISATION: 54%

7.395BILLION

INTERNETUSERS

ACTIVE SOCIAL MEDICAL USERS

UNIQUE MOBILE USERS

ACTIVE MOBILE SOCIAL USERS

7.395BILLION

7.395BILLION

7.395BILLION

7.395BILLION

GLOBAL DIGITAL SNAPSHOTJAN2016

PENETRATION: 46%

PENETRATION:31%

PENETRATION: 51%

PENETRATION:27%

With the global population at 7.395 billion, internet users have increased to 3.419 today. Out of the total internet user base, there are 2.307 billion active social media users.

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From the primitive days of chatrooms and news groups, social media has changed everything. Social media has successfully integrated in our daily life and has changed the way we communicate with friends, family, businesses and influencers.

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Lets have a look how U.S has adopted social media in the past 10 years:The year 2005,witnessed a massive growth with 7% of the U.S population using one or more social networking sites. In 2015 this number increased to 65%. Today 76% of the internet users in the US are glued to Social media.

Growth of Social Media in APAC Region

TOTALPOPULATION

URBANISATION: 47%

4,116MILLION

ACTIVE INTERNET USERS

ACTIVE SOCIAL MEDICAL USERS

MOBILE CONNECTIONS

ACTIVE MOBILE SOCIAL USERS

1,662MILLION

1,211MILLION

3,860MILLION

1,066MILLION

DIGITAL IN ASIA-PACIFIC

PENETRATION: 40%

PENETRATION:20%

PENETRATION: 94%

PENETRATION:26%

JAN2016

20060

2008 2010 2012 2014

25

50

75

100

% of all American adults and internet-using adults who use at least one social networking site

Internet Users All Adults

Growth of Social Media in AmericaThe growth of social media started from the U.S and then expanded to the other parts of the globe. The numbers in the US are continously rising and here’s a snap shot of the trend in the past 10 years.

APAC region plays a significant role in facebook’s succes and growing revenue. It accounts for more than half of all active social media users across the globe . 97% of its users have accesed social media on their mobile phones.

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Active social media users grew at 14%, since Jan 2015 to

1,211 million in 2016

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Social Networking Trends Across Platforms

Unsurprisingly, facebook has the highest number of users followed by YouTube. Instagram has gained popularity in the last 2 years and has seen a massive jump in the number of active users. Twitter has also seen a stready growth in the user base since 2010 . Being a niche network, meant primarily for the professionals, LinkedIn has the lowest number of users. Snapchat, Pintrest and Tumblr are relatively new to the social media industry. However they have made a mark with their innovative content sharing.

The digital age is seeing the emergence and growth of many new social platforms. But Facebook is leading the pack till now. Social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram are also gaining ground in the virtual space.

Here’s a glance at the popularity chart of various social media platforms.

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Changing Dynamics of Social Media in India

TOTALPOPULATION

URBANISATION: 33%

1,319MILLION

ACTIVE INTERNET USERS

ACTIVE SOCIAL MEDICAL USERS

MOBILE CONNECTIONS

ACTIVE MOBILE SOCIAL USERS

375MILLION

136MILLION

1,012MILLION

116MILLION

DIGITAL IN INDIA

PENETRATION: 28%

PENETRATION:10%

PENETRATION: 77%

PENETRATION:9%

JAN2016

The global social media trend has gained traction in India also. Social media in India has increased leaps and bounds, as the number of internet users today have increased to 375 million. The humongoes Indian population of 1,319 million makes the coun-try a potential market for giants like Facebook and Twitter.Currently , in India, 28.4% of the population is using internet and 10.3% are active on social media. In 2011, the percentage of face-book users was just 2.5% of the population. Thanks to Facebook’s strategies for emerging economies, the number is expected to increase to 15%. by the end of 2016. The increased mobile web penetration is also seen as a key contributor to increased growth in active social media usage.

These numbers have also attracted businesses from all verticals and many brands have invested billions since the introduction of social media in India. Brands are working tirelessly to grab the attention of their target audience and penetrate into their daily liives through social media.

Active social media users grew at 15%,

since Jan 2015 to 136

million in 2016

““

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Social media has helped in creation of communities giving rise to crowd culture. This crowdculture is associated with every community formed over social media and defines how a set of individuals interact on a social networking platform.

Historically, cultural innovation flowed from the society including family, friends, fringe groups, social movements and artistic cirlces. But now, social media has changed the way we communicate. Groups and communities that were once isolated, are now interacting with each other and encouraging collaboration. Using social media, these communities have developed a network of culture and have started influencing people with their culture. Crowdculture is divided into two set of groups:

Members of this group, formulate new ideologies and practices. For example: homeschooling, house husbands, artifi-cial inteligence, 3-D printing etc. Before the social media age these groups were disconnected with limited means to communicate. Social media has expanded their reach and within minutes one can enter into any subculture and start communicating. These group members focus on pushing news ideas, products, practices giving rise to the influencer’s age.

Social media has intelinked various artists and entertainers across the globe. In this culture people are becoming cultural entrepreneurs creating art content and sharing it onlne with the users directly and, completely bypassing the intermediar-ies. As a result, people on social media can instantly access content and engage with it. This further leads to new talent and genres since one hardly needs any funding to market and distribute his/her products. Moreover people can also exchange ideas and produce great hits. General audience, on the other hand, has accepted this culture in a postitive way. In return, they get to explore a variety of innovative content everyday with just a few clicks.

Subcultures

Art Worlds

Formation of Crowdcultures

How Users are Engaging On Social MediaSocial media has deeply influenced our lives. Undoubtedly, it has made the world a smaller place with tons of content about anything and everything. This has given many people an opportunity to share their work and life events with a vast audience that is ever increasing. Below are some examples of how communities, brands and individuals are engaging across the social media platforms.

This has been YouTube’s greatest success so far, with more than 7 million followers on Twitter. This video game went global allowing people to enage on this platform.

Travel enthusiasts , have made Instagram an earning source by engaging people visually by posting about popular travel destinations “

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With this enagegment and poppularity of social networking sites many new channels have evolved their own innovative way of engaging audiences. These platforms will be discussed in detail, later in the report.

““Popular brands are leveraging cultural influencers to connect with their audiences and spread brand awareness

NGO that had to work extreamy hard to get their fouces heard are able to engage thousands of people with a single Facebook post “

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Social Media Engagement and Growth: A StudyThanks to the advent of social media, we are all aware of how brands have been leveraging social media marketing to spread aware-ness about there brands and reaching out to their customers. A decade ago many popular global brands were heralding the arrival of social media channels, starting from facebook. Many creative and social media agencies emerged, trying to ‘insert’ brands throught the digital space. Branded content was the center of every social media strategy to reach out to existing and potential customers.There was an outburst of branded content that lead to increased social media engagement across platforms. Business were tempted to post well crafted marketing messages directed towards brand awareness and lead generation. Social media proved to be instru-mental in driving awareness all this while.

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A survey conducted by Social Media Link shows how important social media engagement can be for a brand. 83% of the total respondents across cultures heard the brand on the social media before hearing it from any other source. Facebook and retailer’s website were the most popular sources to discover a brand or a product followed by a brand website and YouTube. All the hoopla around social engagement including number of followers, likes and retweets has made social media an unavoidable marketing channel.

Digital Media Spending Global brands, small business, individuals have been working tirelessly to tear through the crowd cultures and reach their custom-ers directly via social media advertising.

In terms on percentage of the overall global digital ad spend-ing, social network spending accounts for around 13.9% and market share is expected to rise to around 15% by the end of this year. Major chunk of this market share goes to North America, Western Europe and APAC region”. Regions around the world are increasing their social media spending year after year with the rise of innovative social media channels. These numbers show how impactful social media marketing has been in such a short period of time.India is among the fastest growing advertising markets of the world. In India, where digital advertising is still in its growth phase, companies and brands have significantly increased their digital advertising spending.

““Business and individuals have been spending

billions of dollars on social media campaigns across the globe. In 2016, global social media ad spending is expected to reach around $29.91 billion with major contribution from North America and APAC region

Digital Ad spending in India is expected to grow at around 47.5% in 2016 in comparison to the overall Ad spending which is expected to grow at 15.5% ““

Social network % of digital ad spending

North AmericaAsia-PasificWestern EuropeLatin AmericaCentral & Eastern EuropeMiddle East & Africa

Worldwide

2013

10.5%8.0%9.3%8.5%9.0%4.9%

9.4%

2014

14.0%11.4%11.4%9.9%9.3%5.8%

12.2%

2015

15.9%13.5%12.9%10.0%9.4%6.8%

13.9%

2016

17.4%15.3%13.8%10.4%9.5%7.2%

15.1%

2017

18.7%16.8%14.3%10.4%9.7%7.4%

16.0%

Social network ad spending (billions)

2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

North America $4.94$3.25$2.34$0.35$0.41$0.07

$7.71$5.18$3.68$0.54$0.52$0.11

$10.10$7.40$4.74$0.68$0.61$0.16

$12.67$9.66$5.82$0.85$0.70$0.22

$15.15$11.91$6.85$1.00$0.79$0.28

Asia-PasificWestern EuropeLatin AmericaCentral & Eastern EuropeMiddle East & Africa

Worldwide $11.36 $17.74 $23.68 $29.91 $35.98

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DIGITAL AD SPENDING TOGROW THE FASTEST IN 2016

The global trend is expected to gain traction in India and brands are likely to allot more budgets to digital and social media campaigns from their overall marketing budget. In an emerging economy like India, with the growing number of mobile and social media users, there has been a paradigm shift in the media habits, shifting to digital and social. This industry is expected to grow just like various services like the Netflix - video on demand (VOD) still growing in India. As the world becomes more integrated and connected, brands will continue to strategize their digital ad spend with social media cam-paigns becoming more dominant.

To grab the attention of the ever-growing social media audience, brands across the globe have come up with some interesting and imaginative content and are creating remarkable campaigns across social media platforms, to engage their customers and form brand loyalty.

In this section, of the report, there is plenty of evidence to show how social media is playing an increasingly important role in influencing customers, connecting at an emotional and cultural level and defusing new ideology.

Social Media: Brand Engagement

Dove, a beauty brand, identified an universal cultural opportunity and developed a successful social media campaign around the ideology. Instead of following the modern-day trend of unreal beauty definitions, it celebrated the real women’s physique through its real beauty cam-paign showing all kinds of beauty prototypes across cultures. Women across the world shared content and cheered for the campaign that didn’t conform to the beauty myths. “

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These brands had successful campaigns because they targeted ideologies and user’s interest to form opinions and encourage engage-ment. Instead of blasting out promotional messages, they talked about products and brands. A strategy that worked differently than the conventional branded content model. It helped in identifying opportunities to connect with their customers emotionally by including the brand in their ideology.

However not all brands have seen this kind of success on social media. Even today, there are tons of brands that are forcing traditional marketing models on social media platforms and, are still struggling with their social media strategy and content, despite investing billions.

As Per Forrester, 80% of the top 50 global brands are actively posting on the top 5 social media platforms. Although their following has increased, the engagement levels have gone down. This can be accounted to the type of unengaging content these brands are producing.

Popular brands including Pepsi and Coca-Cola are using traditional segmentation for advertising on social media platforms. Same advertisements are marketed across Television and Facebook, which add little value to a platform that promotes communities and opinions. Hence, many brands are missing this opportunity to reach customers differently on every social platform to increase engagement and form an emotional connection.

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To drive engagement, beauty brand – L’Oréal Paris created a successful social media cam-paign for its Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr followers during the Golden Globe Awards. It worked with a team of influencers to pump out real time social media content, recreating the looks of celebrities who walked down the red carpet. These pictures of celebrities were then posted in the form of GIF on Instagram and twitter accounts to open discussions. “

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An Analysis of 3,40,000 social media posts by 214 brands (Measuring average interaction per post per 1,000 followers) by marketing intel-ligence agency, shows that, brands do have large audiences on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. However, engagement levels are not high enough across different verticals to justify the spending on these segments. Instagram and Pinterest, which are all about visual content, have seen a relatively higher engagement across verticals.

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Brand and Celebrity EngagementWith these low engagement numbers, most the brands have found it difficult to reach out to millennials and humanize storytelling in this social media age. Millennials have little interest in the content that businesses across the globe roll out. Very few would want to know about what a brand must offer through promotional messages and videos that they are using offline too.The need is to innovate culturally to penetrate communities across cultures and nations. This is exactly why – athletes, celebrities, The need of the hour is to innovate culturally to penetrate communities across cultures and nations. This is exactly why – athletes, celebrities, musicians, T.V shows, sports teams and performers are so widely popular and successful on the social media. People gather around the tweets and posts of players like Cristiano Ronaldo and teams such as Real Madrid to cheer and talk about football. The popu-larity of these social media accounts is higher than brands like – Nike, Adidas and Puma.

31 130 665

Facebook FansTotal Fans Total Fans

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Celebrity EngagementSocial media is becoming increasingly popular among the celebrities, and the credit goes to the fans and followers. The digital platform allows fans to create rich communities around entertainers, and this gives them the opportunity to interact with them directly through tweets, likes and comments. Sports teams now hire social media ambassadors to reach out to fans in real time during games, and once the game is over, the players send along insider photos and hold locker-room chats. By leveraging the celebrity engagement brands can penetrate communities on social media and tell interesting stories around such celebrities.Social media influencers are solidifying their presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with huge number of followers and fans.

31 130 665

Total Fans Total Fans

Facebook Fans

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This shows the level of engagement celebrities can have with their followers in a single day, leading to direct interaction with fans and other celebrities on the interest area, like in this case – cricket which forms a separate community on social media platforms.These celebrities may create super engaged communities that talk about common interests and have started influencing followers with the gained popularity. This is exactly what social media promised the digital world and has been delivering

Have a look at the way celebrities gather together to discuss cricket during the T20 World Cup!

The Rise of Influencers With the growing popularity of celebrities around the globe, they have start-ed turning into influencers in their respective fields and have starting engaging users through social media. Influencers are generating branded content around a product and are reaching out to their followers. People who follow these celebrities are avid readers of their posts and are likely to pay attention to their opinions and preferences.

A recent study by Twitter, states that 49% of users rely on the recommenda-tions from influencers on Twitter. The influencer market share is growing at a steady pace and similar trends can be seen across other social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Snap Chat where businesses are reaching out to influencers to talk about their brand to their followers.about their brand to their followers.

With the growing number of influencers in every field, you don’t have to be a mass media star to influence people and talk about brand purchases. The same study also showed that, branded tweets increase purchase intent by 2.7 times. Whereas, branded tweets combined with influencer tweets increases the purchase intent by 5.2 times. It would be intersting to see how brands use these influencers across social media to tell their stories to the targeted audiences.

Twitter influencers are challenging friends to inluence purchase decisions ““

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Introducing Yral DigitalWith the reach and the power to influence audiences, celebrities and influencers are the emerging faces of social media market-ing and a roadmap for brands to reach their targeted audiences. Currently, with the numbers shown earlier, engagement for brands on social media has not been promising and brands have to dole out millions to get celebrities endorse their brands and products to increase their reach, but with the evolution of social media in India and across the globe, an engaging content strategy through celebrities and influencers, could give a brand the much needed boost and engagement.

However, celebrity social media endorsement is still fragment-ed, especially in India where brands have to jump a lot of hoops to connect with celebrities. Celebrity endorsements on social media are generally a part of large sponsorship deals and pack-ages by big talent management companies.To help brands easily connect with celebrities, Yral Digital has launched a platform to monetize the celebrity social media campaign where brands have access to celebrity reach on social media. This can be a game changer, since celebrity social media endorsements are not properly monetized in India and brands struggle to crack individual social media endorsement deals with celebrities.

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Social Media Moving Forward: Growth and Opportunities Social media is now around a decade old, and its changing fast. You are either keeping up or quickly become irrelevant. Here are some trending apps that are now a part of the social media revolution.

This is a tool that Twitter describes as a "mini press junket." It is an organized way for stars to answer questions from fans related to upcoming projects with special hashtags. Recently, the feature was used by Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller while promoting their movie Burnt and by the Star Wars cast for The Force Awakens.In India, Sachin tendulkar has joined Twitter Q&A and his official hashtag for the same is #AskSRT. In a matter of hours, there were 20,000 tweets of fans asking questions and they were responded by a video from SRT. Twitter Q&A just took celebrity and fan interaction to the next level.

Twitter Q&A

This new platform by Twitter allows celebrities around the world to customize their photo sharing experience with GIFs and videos and share them directly on twitter. This will surely increase fame and glamour quotient of celebrities on Twitter.

Ello is all about inspiring creators and getting inspired by other creators. Ello is creator’s network that helps you to upoad, edit and share your content and have one on one interactions with audiences who share your passion. This app will grow in popularity as influencers from the art world start sharing their creations.

Twitter Camera

Ello

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With celebrities and commoners all around the world clicking selfies and sharing them all over Facebook, they surely needed a separate platform for their selfie clicks. This app allows you to take/upload shots and then share them.

Shots

Although live-streamig video is still in early stages, the younger audience is perfectly willing to tune into this new form of scheduled, mobile-friendly broadcast, which boasts viral immediacy.Facebook's built-in user base allows brands to reach billions. The social media platform suggests, page owners may use the live streaming for a variety of supplementary content, including back stage happen-ings and Q&As. What differentiates Facebook Live from periscope is that the live videos stay on the brands page.

Live Streaming: Facebook Live and Periscope

Vine Videos

Snap Chat

Vine Videos is an entertainment network where videos and personalities get popular, really fast. It is a new platform that helps users take 6 second looping videos. It is a hit among celebrities. Celeb-rities like Snoopdog and Steve Aoki have been entertaining their followers and fans through Vine Videos.

Lastly, Snapchat is the fastest growing social network, an app that allows users to share live stories through images. Snapchat seems to have the most engaged audience, with more than 400 million snaps per day.

In 2010, Twitter users were posting 50 million tweets per day — the only other network where the number of posts outnumbered the number of users . This shows how this growing platform can impact social media industry as well as the ones using it, especially the popular celebrities.

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