iWorld
Social media strategies for effective brand marketing: A comprehensive guide
Mumbai: In an era dominated by technology and connectivity, social media has become an indispensable tool for brand marketing. According to Search Engine Journal, the statistics are staggering – 4.8 Bn social media users worldwide, representing 60% of the global population and 93% of all internet users. The numbers are still on the rise, with 150 Mn new social media users added between April 2022 and April 2023, translating to approximately 410,000 new users every day and 4.7 every second. With the average person using 6.6 different social networks monthly and spending 2 & 1/2 hours daily on social media, the collective global time spent on these platforms is a whopping 11.5 Bn hours daily. Against this backdrop of compelling statistics, let us explore some social media strategies for effective brand marketing.
Identify Your Goals: It is essential to have a clear understanding of what you are aiming to achieve through your social media marketing efforts. This could be increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or driving website traffic.
Navigate the Right Platform(s) for Your Audience
The plethora of social media platforms can be overwhelming, making it crucial for brands to choose wisely. Utilizing a social media advertising platform can help streamline this process. The primary goal is to find where your target audience is most active. Focus your efforts on two to three platforms to ensure manageability.
Craft Tailored Content for Each Platform
Diversity in content creation is key. Each social media platform has its unique characteristics, and your content should reflect that. Whether it’s Twitter’s concise posts, Facebook’s preference for longer posts accompanied by visuals, or Instagram’s emphasis on high-quality visuals and witty captions – tailor your content accordingly. Visuals have a universal impact, with Facebook posts containing images experiencing 2.3 times higher engagement than those without images. Incorporate a mix of images, videos, blogs, and live video to keep your content strategy dynamic.
Foster Content Sharing Among Your Audience
Social sharing is a potent force in brand marketing. Encourage your audience to share your content, as it not only reaches their immediate network but also acts as a personal recommendation. People are more likely to share content that resonates emotionally, incorporates humor or aligns with their values. Including social sharing options in your blogs, e-commerce store, website and email content facilitates seamless sharing directly from those followers.
Run Targeted Campaigns: Launching specific campaigns via social media platforms can help you reach your intended audience more effectively. These could be promotional campaigns, awareness campaigns or even user-generated content campaigns. The key is to ensure they are targeted towards the users most likely to be interested in your product or service. Use the data you’ve gathered about your audience to help you in this targeting process.
Leverage Influencers for Strategic Partnerships
Connect with influencers whose audience aligns with your brand. Collaborate on content, giveaways, or establish affiliate fee structures. Analyze influencers’ posts to glean insights into content that resonates with their followers. Mentioning influencers, partners, and customers on your platforms creates a sense of community, fostering engagement and expanding your reach.
Cultivate Meaningful Relationships with Your Customers
Social media is a two-way street. Engage with your customers to build relationships, which, in turn, contributes to brand awareness and increased sales. Customer interactions on social media provide an opportunity for potential customers to learn about your brand and gauge your interests through your responses. Recognition and appreciation, expressed through mentions, further solidify the sense of community around your brand.
Invest in Posts and Advertising
As social media platforms evolve, organic reach has diminished. To counteract this, investing in promoted posts and paid advertising may be essential. Craft ads that seamlessly blend with organic content, as they tend to perform better and yield higher conversion rates. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn offer targeted advertising options to ensure your content reaches the right audience.
Regularly Evaluate and Measure Your Progress
An effective social media strategy requires continuous evaluation. Track engagement statistics, post visibility trends, and referral traffic through website analytics. Experiment with different content formats, posting times, and advertising strategies until you find what resonates best with your audience. Regularly measuring and adapting to the changing landscape will ensure sustained success in your brand marketing efforts.
Conclusion
A well curated social media strategy is imperative for effective brand marketing in today’s digital age. By understanding your audience, tailoring content, fostering engagement, and strategically utilizing influencers, brands can navigate the dynamic landscape of social media and build a strong and loyal customer base. As the social media landscape continues to evolve, staying agile, adaptable and continually assessing your approach will be key to staying ahead in the competitive world of brand marketing.
The following article is attributed to Walplast senior VP group marketing, CSR & business head – P2P Division Aniruddha Sinha.
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
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.
