9 ways Indians differ on Facebook

Recently, Facebook announced that there are over 150m Indians who access Facebook at least once in a month. This makes India its second biggest market after USA. Let’s try to understand how Facebook’s second largest marketing in greater detail. Facebook’s ‘Audience Insights’ tool gives us a way to get a peak into its India user-base and understand how we use Facebook. Here are some key insights:

Huge gender skew: 76 per cent of the Indian Facebook users are male, leaving only 24 per cent female users. This is quite a peculiar stat for India. Globally, this ratio is more balanced with 56 per cent males to 44 per cent females, while in United States, there are more females on Facebook than there are males.

Also, there seems to be declining usage trend with age, regardless of the gender. More teenagers seem to like Facebook than older folks. So, if you are trying to target older females for your marketing campaigns, you’ll have a very limited reach compared to the reach you’d get if you were targeting younger females or males.

Popularity: Most liked categories by Indians include electronic products like mobile (also popular among males, which comprise majority of Indian users), food and beverage companies, female celebrities (again, potentially a function of gender bias in the user-base), political (PM Narendra Modi and CM Arvind Kejriwal being the most popular ones) figures and sportspersons. For advertisers, this hints the type of content Indian audiences like. This should be considered while creating a content marketing strategy on Facebook.

Top cities: As expected, majority of the Indian Facebook users come from the big cities. It’s also a function of internet availability and smartphone penetration (while FB is available on feature phones, the experience on smartphones is far superior). Delhi and New Delhi account for around 13 per cent of the users, followed by Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. So, Facebook is a great platform for reaching your potential customers in the big cities, not so much if you are targeting smaller cities or remote locations.

Frequency of activities: On an average, Indian users like seven pages and six posts in a month, click on three ads, and comment twice. All these stats are lower than global average of 12 pages likes, seven posts likes, four comments and seven ad clicks. It seems like Indian users are harder to please. However, it might be cheaper to reach more Indians than in other countries and hence, get higher overall engagement, but at lower engagement rates.

Devices used: This is also where Indian users are quite unique. The mobile leapfrogging PCs in adoption are quite evident from the following data. Almost 73 per cent of Indian users access Facebook from mobile only, while only 6 per cent access it from desktop only. For comparison, globally, only 53 per cent of the users access Facebook mobile only. Also, only 2 per cent of the users have iPhones/iPads, while 31 per cent use Android and 20 per cent use feature phones.

So, if you are promoting your website on Facebook, it’ll be a good idea to optimize it for mobile, especially for Android and feature phones. You can also use this targeting for your mobile app install ads, targeting only the platforms your mobile app is available on.

Relationship status and parents: Almost 30-35m Indian users have mentioned that they are ‘Single’ on their profiles. Again, there are more men who are singles than females. As expected, there are younger folks who are single compared to older folks. Only around 2.5m people have mentioned that they are in a relationship (Indians are known to be not very open about their relationship status, other than being single or married). Around 1m people are in a long distance relationship and around 90K just got into a new relationship.

Around 10-15m Indian users have declared their relationship status as ‘married’ on Facebook, the majority lying in the 25-34 age group. Interestingly, majority of Indian women on Facebook are married

Around 15m Indian users on Facebook are parents, with around 350K people with kids less than 3 years old, 1.5m with kids less than 12 years old and similar number of people with teenage kids. This data is most likely under-represented because not a lot of people tag their relationships on Facebook. However, the available data (which is most likely going to be pretty accurate) is a goldmine for advertisers who are trying to target parents or married people in a certain age range.

Life events and travelling: Around 15m Indians on Facebook live away from family, around 20m are away from their home town, around 600K recently moved (all three are good target audience for travel and rental real-estate companies), around 800K recently switched their jobs. This data is also likely to be accurate based on the profile data and IP addresses.

High value users: Audience insights reveal that there are around 25-30m Indian users who have shown affinity towards high value goods. So, if you are selling iPhones, smart-watches, other luxury goods, you can start here.

Top industries where Indians work in: Majority of Indians on Facebook work either in management, production, arts, and engineering industries. Targeting based on job titles can help you if you are selling B2B products.

There’s much more you can find out with Facebook Audience Insights. It is one of the most utilised tools. It’s is a wonderful tool for your market research and strategising your digital campaigns, not just on Facebook, but across channels.

— By Durgesh Kaushik, Digital Marketer and social media evangelist

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The statistics and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of any of author's current or past employers. The statistics presented in the article are not the official statistics endorsed by any company, but have been derived from Facebook's Audience Insights tool, available publicly.