Vijayawada: Social media does not seem to be evenly spread out across the country at the moment. An analysis of various social media platforms’ usage levels by region reveal that the eastern part of the country which includes Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Assam and the rest of the states of the North East seems to be lagging behind the rest of the the country at present.
Not only were three-fourths of voters in this region found to have no exposure to social media at all as per our social media exposure index, it also has the lowest proportion of users across all the five social media platforms.
Only about one-fourth of voters in this region were found to be using Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube as opposed to the overall national average of one-third. As far as Twitter and Instagram are concerned, usership of these social media platforms is currently at 6 per cent and 8 per cent respectively in eastern India. The states that seem to be performing particularly poorly are Odisha, Assam and West Bengal.
It must be noted here that Lokniti did not conduct a survey in Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram and Sikkim during the recent national elections hence there were unable to comment about social media usage in these states.
The states in the southern, western and northern parts of the country show the highest levels of exposure to/usage of social media platforms and are twice as likely to have high exposure to social media as the states in the eastern part of the country.
South India has the highest percentage of WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube users, followed closely by north India. The Western region which comprises of the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa also reported reasonably high use of social media platforms, except Twitter.
