iWorld
Twitter introduces Times Twitter Impact List: Shah Rukh Khan is most influential Bollywood actor
MUMBAI: For the first time, Twitter has come up with new matrix to judge the impact created on the social media platform based on engagement scores – and actor Shah Rukh Khan has emerged a clear winner.
Twitter in partnership with Times of India has compiled lists of rank well-known politicians, Bollywood actors, TV actors, musicians, sport stars, and media brands based on their new measuring unit.
“Over time, it becomes important to understand what impact these personalities have on their audience and what the true criterion on which their impact depends is. We thought it was important to put out the variety and the breadth of the creators and content producers on twitter who have the maximum impact on their lives,” said Twitter head of TV partnerships – India Viral Jani, adding that the list has been compiled based on absolutely organic reach and does not take into account any paid engagement.
Since its inception, Twitter has been a powerful platform and tool to gauge popular opinion, breaking news and bridging the gap between celebrities and popular personalities and their fans or start a social campaign. The number of followers any personality has always becomes the benchmark for their importance on the platform and their level of influence.
“We created a new index by measuring the engagement coming from an handle based on the number of replies, re-tweets and favourites the handle’s content gets and aggregating that into an impact score. It is the true extent of how much impact the person have on the platform, how viral their content gets, and their impact beyond twitter as several media organizations follow Twitter closely and report from information available on the platform, what is noticed in twitter travels to television, print and other digital platforms as well,” Jani added.
Going by the new Times Twitter Impact List that has been compiled for the year of 2015, Amitabh Bachchan is the Bollywood actor with the most number of followers but it is Shah Rukh Khan who rules the platform when it comes to engagement and impact, Actor Aamir Khan does not even feature in the top ten lists. Similarly the Quantico starrer Priyanka Chopra emerged as the Bollywood female actress with the most impact on her audience.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean that if one has a higher number of followers they also command the most amount of impact on their audience. The focus is on how they engage with their audience, how they keep them interactive to their profiles, etc,” Jani pointed out.
Among Television personalities, actor-comedian Kapil Sharma and actor-dancer Gauhar Khan steal the show.
When it comes to most influential politicians on Twitter, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi tops the list, followed by Subramaniam Swamy and Arvind Kejriwal. The most impactful business leaders are Mahindra Group’s chairman and MD, Anand Mahindra followed by Colors TV CEO Raj Nayak.
In sports, Sachin Tendulkar is the undisputed king of engagements among men, while Sania Mirza tops the list among women.
Based on the growing importance given to measurability of one’s social media influence, Twitter’s new ‘Impact Index’ may become the new currency to quantify virality, which makes the measurement and the list far more powerful for brands to map their social media presence. Brand managers and advertisers are sure to keep an eye on the lists as well.
Asked if Twitter is considering partnering with brands to share their impact scores with them, Jani said, “The key differentiator for this list is that it is meant for our users and the consumer. We may consider it if we want to get into the brand space later, but for now the lists are strictly consumer facing.”
Twitter is considering to add few more categories of lists the the current few depending on the reception of this new initiative.
Lists:
Bollywood Male Actors
Bollywood Female Actors
Directors
Music Artists
Indian Politicians
Cricketers and Other Sports personalities
Business Leaders
TV Male and Female personalities
TV channels
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
