Indian Social Networks, Blogging & Social Media Trends with Google Insights
With my prediction post on Indian Social Media scene due tomorrow (read my last one here), I got hold of an interesting tool to see through the hour glass of what’s been happening in Indian social networks, social media & blogging over the years. Thanks to Steve Rubel for the tip-off. The tool is from none other than than the Grand Daddy of aggregating information – Google. It’s Google Insights for Search – which launched earlier this year. It’s the closest thing we have to a global time capsule. So after seeing Steve’s post on what’s happening in US, I got inquisitive too. So I started mining specifically into 3 trends around which we have been talking all this while i.e. Social Networks, Blogging & Social Media.
And sure I’ve got some interesting stats. It’s really interesting what search queries can tell us. Though it was quite predictable but when knowledge is backed by figures and stats, it becomes more than just a prediction. So here are three trends that I captured through Google Insights:
Indian Social Network Trends
It isn’t surprising that Indian social networks have been growing for sometime with Orkut leading the way along with Facebook and few others. But alongside, many Indian social networks have also proliferated which makes the growth a distributed one. The stats above are from January ‘08 to December ‘08. Along the year 2008, it seems interest level of Indian online population has been diminishing putting a need for further consolidation with newer ways to engage users other than just one-to-one to one-to-many messaging.
Indian Social Media Trends
Yes, these stats are encouraging. Social Media related search queries have increased over the period of early ‘07 to December 2008. That’s a healthy sign for the nascent Social Media industry. Interest level generated from the search queries also show encouraging signs which have increased from 31% from nearly 80% around December 2008. Infact, I believe that coming year of 2009 will show further encouraging trends in Indian social media space since company executives are now thinking to shift their analog dollars to more engagement oriented digital pennies, slowly & steadily.
Indian Blogging Trends
Many have dubbed that Blogging is dead. Though I’ve another viewpoint to it. What if its just a consolidation phase where people are trying out newer shiny stuffs that internet has to offer? But truly, the personal and intuitive touch that a blogging platform gives can’t be taken away that easily. But Indian Blogging has been through the maturity phase wherein it went into mainstream post 2005, then some minor consolidation around 2006-2007, thats when people started spending considerable amount of time consuming other formats of online media (YouTube launched in 2006 and Twitter was also in its nascent stage). On the same note, 2008 has also not showing healthy trends for Indian blogging. Primarily because of microblogging platforms and allied services which grabbed internet users attention.
So what is your take on Social networks, blogging & social media trends generated from search queries? Do you see these trend following in 2009 even? Would love to hear from you!
Search Interactive Marketing Blog
December 30th, 2008 at
Hey Sampad,
Those stats are actually true. Specially in case of the Social Network Trends. We, the heroic Indians, over did it. We thought creating Social Networking sites is as easy as selling insurance and sticking up ugly stickers behind auto-rickshaws and buses. People are quite fed up of it unless they see it giving them something completely different.
But had those websites taken a different route to reach out to their audience, it would have been a better game. Too bad most of them never realized it. And Good Luck SMM. I am in it!
As always, Great write-up (I’m fed up of the word “blog”)!
Cheers
December 31st, 2008 at
Interesting perspective, Sampad, thanks.
I have been interested in social media evolution for some time, and blogged a while back about such trends (although lacking your excellent data).
Basically, there are two countervailing trends, fragmentation and consolidation.
The former arises from disruptive technologies such as Ning that have, as Kanika puts it, made creating online communities “easy as selling insurance”.
So users will migrate into those communities that best suit their interests, and the space fragments.
Consolidation arises as survival of the fittest kicks in and certain tools come to dominate, such as Facebook. There is another kind of consolidation, viz. aggregation, with tools such as FriendFeed which aggregate content from several different sources. There is also dissemination of content in the other direction through tools that push out to multiple channels, such as ping.fm and Utterli.
January 1st, 2009 at
Good stuff Sampad!
One thing I am not very sure of but how does search.twitter.com play in Indian markets. Twitter is big when it comes to social interactions but google search stats don’t do justics to that.
Cheers
Vishal
January 1st, 2009 at
@Vishal I’m not too sure about the question you asked but let me put forward my thoughts on whatever I understood –
Summize (Search.Twitter) is a handy tool if you’re using twitter as it lets you to keep up with the conversations in realtime. To take it from a biz perspective, it can be used to listen what people are talking about your brand/service or anything related to your company (good or bad) which might be of much interest.
You can say, its another way to keep up with Online Reputation Management (ORM). Read http://sampadswain.com/2008/12/tools-tips-to-manage-your-online-reputation/
BTW if I’ve left something unanswered, pls revert!
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Sampad
January 5th, 2009 at
Sampad – interesting but simplistic views.
Search terms ‘change’ with time. A couple of years ago the terms in usage were blogs, blogging, blogosphere and then lately the terms of use have shifted to Social Media, Social Networking, Dynamic Web etc. any comprehensive trend study has to take into account the transition of words too.
I do believe though the days of blogs being used as mainstream forms of expression for personal diaries or journals are over for most – that need is nicely met by Social Networking sites but the days of focused blogging have just begun. The numbers may not grow that quickly but the quality is going to see a quantum leap.
Cheers
Rajesh
September 18th, 2009 at
It’s just enough to fill u with filth n evil, my friend,
And trusting the times I know that so easily it won’t end.
But all this violence n greed for power, has stopped interrupting me as,
I sleep within.
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