Social media behavior among youth in India : a review

in a previous report quoted in my post on "multiple user accounts at social networking site" mentioned the 'fatigue' among youth from social media. Here's another report published at comscore found that Google Sites ranked as the top destination in June 2012 reaching nearly 95 percent of the online population, while social networking reigned as the top online activity accounting for 25.2 percent of all online minutes!
The study – conducted by ComScore in June 2012 – exposes the accessible and engagement habits of Indian Internet users. While the Google Sites leads the list of top online destination in India with 94.8% reach, Facebook stands quite close behind with 83.4%. More than 57 million unique visitors accessed Google sites in June 2012 compare to Facebook’s 50.8 million. Among Indian brands, Times Internet sites took leads with 20.5 million reach beating its close competitors Network 18 and Rediff.com with significant margin.Yahoo and Microsoft Sites are comparatively less attractive among Indian internet users. While Yahoo Sites gained attention from 39.9 million unique visitors in June, Microsoft Sites reduced to only 29.3 million unique visitors. The report mentioned, Indian Internet users are more connected and engaged with social media titan than Google Sites. Each Indian Internet user spent around 224 minutes in June compare to 155 minutes over Google Sites. Social Media has emerged as the most preferred among users as it consumes more than 25% of total internet time spent. Surprisingly, Search and Email grabbed only 8.1% and 3.2% of total internet time respectively – losing the attention among Indian Internet users.In last few years, Google has been the most preferred and responsive destination for advertisers and marketers. However, the trend seems to shifting towards social networking sites, especially towards Facebook. For advertisers, the most valuable aspect in digital marketing the amount of time users stay engaged with any site and Social Media clearly leads here with 25% of online time consumption. Facebook has emerged as a clear winner over Google where Indian Internet users are spending more time than any other online property. In India, Google Android is the leading Smartphone OS and Facebook has serious take on it. While 93% of Android users in India are accessing social media from their phone, Facebook is equally recording high response from Google’s Android than any other mobile device currently available in 3^rd biggest Internet country in the world.

The interesting contradiction of insights are arising due to the misunderstanding of 'usage' of social network. As mentioned earlier in my previous article, the youth in India are having multiple accounts to stay connected at social networks. It can be a growing trend due to affinity towards 'split persona' and easy 'mutation' behavior among youth. India, being a diversified multi-layered society encourages individuals to mutate according to the social environment (in regards to dressing, attitude, having, interest and opinion). 

In this song sequence of "Delhi 6" Bollywood movie its realistically shown on how the youth 'mutates' according to the social environment. The heroine of the movie changes the dress to appear 'different and contemporary' which might not be 'recorded' in a conventional 'survey' if any organization do the same on dressing styles / dressing behavior among youth in India (cause, she will never tell in the survey that she wears 'western dresses' !).