iWorld
PM Modi, Sonu Sood & Kunal Kamra top Twitter engagement in Oct 2020
NEW DELHI: Social media analytics firm Twitteet has released its October analytics report. Leading their respective fields in terms of engagement were prime minister Narendra Modi, actor Sonu Sood, and comedian Kunal Kamra, all of whom accounted for a total of over one crore impressions on Twitter in the month of October.
Key highlights of the first report include the remarkable rise of Tejashwi Yadav, who clocked over 1.24 million engagements in October, overshadowing incumbent Bihar CM Nitish Kumar who managed only 133,879 engagements. PM Narendra Modi topped the overall Indian Twitter engagement rankings with over 7.2 million impressions.
Sonu Sood, who was dubbed ‘messiah of migrants’ at the peak of the Covid2019 pandemic, topped Twitter engagement among Bollywood stars with a phenomenal 2.4 million engagements. Shah Rukh Khan was at second position with 7.3 lakh engagements. Akshay Kumar with 6.72 lakh engagements was in third place, and Anupam Kher with 4.74 lakh engagements came in fourth. Former Maharashtra CM, the late Vilasrao Deshmukh’s actor-son Riteish Deshmukh was at fifth position with 4.2 lakh engagements. Pooja Hegde was the surprise entrant into the top 10 with 2.51 lakh engagements.
Controversial stand-up comic Kunal Kamra topped the list of comedians with 1.1 million engagements. Kamra, a frequent and favourite target of brickbats from certain sections of social media, is active on Twitter where he posts his frank takes on hot-button issues, often laced with his signature pithy humour. Recently, he was in the news for a series of tweets taking aim at the Supreme Court and the bench of judges who granted bail to Republic TV editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami in an abetment to suicide case.
The IPL was the flavour of the season for cricketers and it comes as no surprise that India captain and expectant father Virat Kohli scored the highest Twitter engagement, with 2.4 million impressions. Suresh Raina was at second position with 1.9 million engagements. Former stars Sachin Tendulkar at third position, Harbhajan Singh at fifth position, and Virendra Sehwag at sixth position, actively engage with fans and followers on Twitter with 1.5 million; 6.8 lakh and 6.3 lakh engagements. Aakash Chopra, now a commentator, is also hugely popular and ranked in the fourth place with over 9.65 lakh engagements on Twitter in October. Perennial favourite Mahendra Singh Dhoni was completely inactive on Twitter in October despite more than 8.1 million followers.
In the intensively competitive journalists category, News Nation’s Deepak Chaurasia topped Twitter engagement with a whopping 1.88 million engagements. AajTak’s Rohit Sardana was at second position with 1.1 million engagement, followed by Sushant Sinha with 1.05 million impressions. Veteran journalist and India Today’s consulting editor Rajdeep Sardesai came in at number eight with 6.6 lakh engagements, and Rana Ayyub was at sixth position with 7.6 lakh engagements.
In the business leaders category, Anand Mahindra towered over others with over 4 lakh engagements. RPG Groups chief Harsh Goenka was at second position with 2.2 lakh engagements. Chinese mobile phone brands India CEO’s Manu Kumar Jain of Xiaomi and RealMe’s Madhav Sheth were at third and fourth position respectively with 1.5 lakh and 1.1 lakh engagements. Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji with 49,000 engagements was at fifth position, Biocon’s Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw with 41,000 engagements at sixth position, Marico’s Harsh Mariwala with 24,000 engagements is at seventh position, Micromax co-founder Rahul Sharma with 19,000 engagements at eight position and chairman of JSPL and former MP, Naveen Jindal with 16,000 engagements is at ninth position. Google’s Global CEO Sundar Pichai with 15,000 engagements is at tenth position.
This is the first time social media analytics for Twitter engagement across 20 categories have been done on a daily, monthly basis in a transparent manner. The categories whose Twitter engagement have been analysed include politicians (party-wise), journalists, business leaders (founders & investors), sportspersons (cricket and other sports), movie stars (Bollywood and regional), authors, chefs, and comedians.
Here are the winners from some key categories:
1. Politicians – Narendra Modi – 72,15,913 Twitter engagements
2. Bollywood – Sonu Sood – 24,36,601 Twitter engagements
3. Business Head – Anand Mahindra – 4,08,882 Twitter engagements
4. Cricketer – Virat Kohli – 24,65,918 Twitter engagements
5. Sports Star (non-cricket) – Vijender Singh – 4,27,006 Twitter engagements
6. TV Star – Sidharth Shukla – 3,90,901 Twitter engagements
7. Journalist – Deepak Chaurasia – 18,88,720 Twitter engagements
8. Founders – Kunal Shah – 60,093 Twitter engagements
9. Comedians – Kunal Kamra – 11,46,111 Twitter engagements
10. Regional Cinema Star – Mahesh Babu – 7,32,964 Twitter engagements
11. Authors – Anand Ranganathan – 5,36,874 Twitter engagements
12. Investor – Mohandas Pai – 99,741 Twitter engagements
Said Twitteet co-founder Sandeep Amar: “Our social monitoring and actionable insights to the leaders across various domains and also to businesses and marketers. We run daily analysis of all engagements – which are the total of likes and retweets, collate these every month, across categories; and then slice and dice them to mine actionable insights. At some level, a leader's Twitter engagement gives one sense of his connect with his constituents and what are the key issues that matter. We hope to sharpen this data over time and broad base our offerings to other social platforms and geographies.”
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.
