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41.5% spend around 1-5% of their marketing budget on social media: E&Y
MUMBAI: 41.5 per cent spend around 1 per cent to 5 per cent of their marketing budget on social media, as per the Ernst & Young‘s new report titled ‘Social Media Marketing – India Trends Study 2013‘. Most social media budgets are below Rs 10 million.
The findings of the report are based on a survey of 48 social media-savvy organisations in India as well as secondary research. The key questions that the study attempts to answer include what is the business objective for using social media, what are the commonly used strategies and measures, the average social media budget and its future prospects.
Community building and highlighting company news are the top reasons for social media use by organisations in India. They are also increasingly using social media to generate leads, provide customer service, conduct research, get customer feedback, understand customer behavior and do competitive benchmarking, according to the report.
The report further states, Facebook is the most popular social media platform in India with more than 62 million users, and is the favorite playground for social media savvy organisations to banter in everyday conversations and engage in promotions and contests for its fans. Additionally, almost half of the organisations surveyed are already using emerging platforms such as Pinterest, Google Plus, and Foursquare.
“Social media is fast emerging as a means of partnership between organisations and their customers, leading to continuous engagement and deeper loyalty. Many Indian organisations are already using social media in an advanced manner, even though there are ample growth opportunities. The future is looking bright with increase in scale and sophistication; however, social media savvy organisations need to analyse their maturity level and explore new opportunities. They can move beyond marketing and see which other departments can benefit from using social media. Clarity of purpose and engaging universally accepted approaches in calculating ROI from social media marketing will help organisations make bigger investments in this area,” Ernst & Young advisory director and leader – customer practice Dinesh Mishra opines.
More than half of the social media-savvy organisations in India, who participated in the survey, post two to three updates on their Facebook pages a day. A quarter of the organisations surveyed said that they post one update per day on their Facebook pages. About one-third said that they post more than three tweets a day on Twitter, while 28.9 per cent said they tweet two to three times a day. On the speed of response – one-fourth of the surveyed organisations respond to fan queries on Facebook within an average of 30 minutes of the query being posted, which indicates a robust monitoring and response structure in place. On Twitter, 28 per cent respond to their fans and followers within 30 minutes. However, 14 per cent of the organisations still take 13-24 hours to respond.
With social media becoming a key component of the marketing strategy for companies, the need to appease online fans comes as a natural extension. 64.6 per cent of the surveyed organisations said they have organised exclusive deals for online fans and 20.8 per cent said they are likely to organise such deals in the future. 83 per cent of the surveyed said that they have used social media advertisements majorly to promote a contest/campaign or for brand awareness and 88.6 per cent said they find social media advertisements beneficial in achieving their objectives.
Almost all of social media efforts in India are managed by in-house teams: 76.7 per cent of the surveyed expressed that social media is handled by their marketing department with the rest being managed by a cross-functional team or by the public relations and communications team. Other than using it for marketing activities, 34.6 per cent said they use social media for thought leadership while 26.9 per cent use it to promote corporate social responsibility. A majority (70.2 per cent) said they have an in-house social media expert in middle management.
Knowing how the social media governance situation looks like within an organisation comes with many benefits such as recognising strategic opportunities, enhancing competitive advantage, conducting efficient recruitment, cost reduction, generating revenue, creating valued relationships and controlling strategic, operational, reputational and legal risks.
“Social media-savvy organisations are very optimistic about the role of social media in their organisations. Organisations have realised that social media generates great insights and helps engaging with customers on a continuous basis, and in some cases also generates sales and leads. Social media has helped organisations to create their own communities of fans, customers and prospects. The huge growth and demand of internet connected devices in India is only going to further strengthen the influence and power of social media in customer engagement, and organisations may well look at meeting their strategic goals and business needs through this channel in future,” Mishra concluded.
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Inshorts Group chief Deepit Purkayastha joins IAB video council for Southeast Asia and India
The co-founder and chief executive of the short-form content platform has been inducted into the IAB SEA+India Video Council, giving India a stronger voice in shaping digital video frameworks
NOIDA: India has long been the world’s most chaotic, multilingual and mobile-first digital market. Now, one of its most prominent short-video executives is getting a seat at the table where the rules are written.
Deepit Purkayastha, co-founder and chief executive of Inshorts Group, has been selected as a member of the IAB SEA+India Video Council for 2026. Run by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the council brings together senior leaders from Southeast Asia and India to shape standards, best practices and measurement frameworks for the fast-evolving video and digital advertising ecosystem.
The timing is pointed. According to the IAMAI-Kantar Internet in India Report 2025, over 588 million Indians are now consuming short-video content, with growth increasingly driven by rural and non-metro audiences. India’s active internet user base has crossed 950 million, with 57 per cent of users now coming from rural markets. Yet the frameworks that govern how video consumption is measured and monetised were largely designed for single-language, Western markets and have struggled to keep pace with the scale, diversity and complexity of India’s digital landscape.
Purkayastha is no stranger to these debates. He already serves on the AI Council at Marketing and Media Alliance India and as co-chair of the Digital Entertainment Committee at the Internet and Mobile Association of India. His induction into the IAB SEA+India Video Council extends that influence into the global video standards arena.
Inshorts Group sits squarely at the intersection of these forces. Its flagship product, Inshorts, India’s highest-rated short news app, reaches 12 million active users with 60-word news summaries. Its sister platform, Public App, reaches 80 million monthly active users across more than 700 districts and 12 languages, serving communities that most global platforms barely register.
Purkayastha said the opportunity was about building something more representative. “India today sits at the centre of the global video ecosystem, but the frameworks that define how value is created and measured have not always kept pace with the realities of our market,” he said. “Being part of the IAB SEA+India Video Council is an opportunity to contribute to a more representative and future-ready approach, one that accounts for diversity in language, context, and user intent.”
As a council member, Purkayastha will contribute to shaping regional standards across video advertising, measurement and platform governance, with a focus on frameworks that are native to India’s multilingual, mobile-first ecosystem rather than imported from global benchmarks designed elsewhere.
For years, India has been content to play by rules written for other markets. Purkayastha’s induction is a signal that it is done waiting to be consulted and ready to start writing them.
