iWorld
GUEST COLUMN: The changing landscape of social networking platforms in India
Mumbai: Social networking and social media have evolved tremendously over the years. Social networking platforms have played a major role in facilitating the collaboration of people with similar interests by providing a way for people to interact instantaneously, without barriers, and using tools literally at their fingertips.
With the changing landscape of social networking platforms over the past decade, people have moved from in-person socialization to relying on digital social platforms to stay connected and communicate. This trend has been attributed to the rapidly changing pace of peoples’ lives and as they become busier their preference for the convenience social platforms offer becomes more apparent. People prefer being connected via social platforms as the ability for people to meeting in person has reduced. They now have access to infinite amounts of information about every member in their social circle via social media.
A few years ago, social networking sites were primarily used for sharing life updates, but their role has changed drastically. While at first largely used to digitally connect with friends, acquaintances, colleagues, family members; they have now become a storehouse with an abundance of information ranging from peoples’ whereabouts to current affairs worldwide, educational content, promotional videos, and entertainment bytes. All kind of information is available at peoples’ fingertips encouraging and allowing for active engagement with each other.
Social platforms have become mobile and portable all thanks to the increased usage of smartphones and the development of application-based versions. Additionally, due to technological advancements, companies have also started leveraging the power and vast reach of social platforms to generate leads, increase their brand awareness, and create a community for like-minded people so that they can support each other and engage in fruitful conversations.
The usage of social networking platforms has indeed witnessed a surge at the global level. While various factors contribute to this growth, the availability of smartphones at nominal prices and easy access to the internet can be suggested as the primary reasons for the inculcation of social networking trends.
Another interesting fact is that until a few years ago, social networking platforms were common amongst the urban population, especially millennials. Recently, these platforms have broken every demographic wall and quickly spread to people of all backgrounds including those of age, gender, and geography, becoming equally prominent in the non-metro cities, and are used for both information gathering and entertainment purposes.
Pandemic: Boosting the need for Social Networking Platforms
The occurrence of the pandemic last year contributed to the increased power of social networking platforms. With mass lockdowns, curfews, and shutdowns across the globe that took away the ability for people to socialize in person, people actively started relying on social networking platforms to stay connected with their networks, families, and friends. Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, social networking online became a lifeline for many families and friends not only allowing people to stay connected but in fact, connecting people more frequently than before. Friends, families, and colleagues all saw a sharp rise in the amount of communication via video calls, social platform messaging, and overall digital communication. Social platforms provided a much-needed and critical avenue for communication to remain intact, and for people to stay connected to each other.
Evolution of social networking platforms in India
Currently, social media continues to evolve as a most vital tool for communication as it is equipped with the ability to exchange information, influence opinions, connect individuals, and nurture communities. In India specifically, the active number of people using various social media and social networking platforms continues to grow with each passing day.
According to a Datareportal Global Overview Report in partnership with We Are Social and Hootsuite, on average 1.3 million new people joined social media every day during 2020. This equates to roughly 15½ new users in the social space every second. It also states that more than half of the world, which is approximately 4.2 billion people, presently uses social media and social networking platforms. Smart Insights reports a similar trend and states that presently, 53.5 per cent of the world’s total population uses social media and networking sites and the daily average social media usage is two hours 25 minutes.
As per Statista’s report, in India a person spends approximately 17 hours on social networking platforms every week, and that almost every two in three Indians who are smartphone owners are present on some kind of social media or networking sites, and actively accesses it. It further states that the number of people on social networking platforms is projected to surpass the 400 million mark by the end of 2021, and it is anticipated to grow to approximately 447.9 million people by 2023.
These statistics depict that social networking and social media are transforming the way people communicate and connect. One might even say that social media and networking sites are the ‘new word of mouth’.
Summing up
Social networking platforms enable the collaboration of members who have shared interests and a will to connect with like-minded people. The increasing number of online communications via social networking platforms have paved the way for community building that brings like-minded people under one roof. They have enabled networking at a global level even during the present (post-lockdown) times. The landscape of social networking platforms has undergone a shift and continues to evolve and progress. This has further led to the online conversations in social networking platforms to soar rapidly and they show no sign of stopping as platforms continue to become more elaborate with new features and ways of connecting people around the world.
(Rebecca Garfinkel is the marketing and social Lead of ChekMarc. The views expressed in the column are personal and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.)
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.
