The instantaneous nature of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, has created a new way for us to connect and share information.Today we interact, comment and share anything, anytime.
More importantly, these platforms have given the world a new profession- the one pursued by a ‘social media professional’. This evolving trend has seeped into almost every part of our personal and professional lives.
People and organisations have become very particular about our personas online. Many countries take social media seriously, making it a separate profession altogether.
In the past few years, many companies have thought of hiring a social media specialist, or have tried giving it a proper job description.
Some common social media job titles you may encounter today are blogger, brand manager, content manager, director of social media, social media analyst and so on.
It is expected that by 2020 majority of companies will have an online presence thereby increasing a lot of career opportunities in digital marketing. It is also expected that 90 per cent of the companies will rely on digital marketing in India which will generate more than 20 lakh jobs.
Colleges and universities, as a part of their marketing/business curriculum, have included social media to keep up with the growing demand for social media experts. This indicates a giant leap in the scope of digital marketing and proves that social media has become more of a career option that too with high salaries.
Although social media programmes are available, but for social media to flourish, institutions need to rethink and redesign their curriculum and introduce social media as one of the primary subjects. To achieve this, a special body to regulate social media in India to turn it into a profession like CA should be created.
The Government of India has also started to take social media seriously. The Supreme Court recently took a strong note of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s decision to set up a social media hub for monitoring online data and said that it will be like creating a surveillance State. The ministry had proposed to hire people including local journalists and stringers for this project.
Indians use their phones most for social communications and entertainment. The average mobile internet user in India spend almost 70 per cent of the time on apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, which is much more than by people in the United States. Besides this, there has also been a cultural shift from the traditional television viewing to viewing content online.
In India, more and more people have ditched television and embraced online content. This has enabled nearly 30 video streaming platforms to pave their way into the Indian landscape in the past few years.
This rapid shift has also been accelerated by the launch of Reliance Jio. According to data from the Department of Telecom, the average data usage per subscriber grew 25 times from 62 MB per month in 2014 to 1.6 GB per month in 2017.
Most of the brands allocate a big chunk of their marketing budget to digital platforms.
A survey indicated that nearly 40 per cent of the marketers use digital marketing with a prime motive of lead generation.
This is, however, an interesting shift since one of the surveys in 2016 projected that creating brand awareness was the prime objective of a digital marketing exercise.
This simply indicates that marketing objectives keep changing along with the search engine algorithms and consumer expectations, and in order to stay competitive in digital marketing, it is important for the companies to crack strategies not only based on consumer’s needs and expectations but also the company’s objective.
And social media, being the game-changer in today’s world, will always play a key role.
(AN Tripathy is Deputy General Manager of Personnel and Corporate Communicationin THDCIL. Gaurav Kumar is the Deputy Manager of Public Relations and Social Media officer at THDCIL)