“Social media is now ingrained in the way tech savvy Indians live their lives. With its ability to play multiple roles in an individual’s life by enabling shared experiences, creating linkages between communities and satisfying the need to be networked, its role in creating a deeper engagement is a boon to marketing,” said Adrian Terron, Vice President of Global Communications and Marketing for Nielsen.

“The social web appears to have gone beyond supplementing communication. Online Indians today are using social media to facilitate activities that range from leisure like entertainment, improving their livelihood through job searches and researching prospective partners,” said Suhale Kapoor, EVP, AbsolutData.

What Social Growth Means for Brands in India
Social media is also gathering momentum rapidly. Based on the current rate of growth and the intention of online Indians to participate in social media, the study estimates that over the next six months 45,000 online Indians intend to join social networking sites each day.

When asked about the awareness of brands on social media, a fourth of online Indians were able to recall brands using social media. Of those consumers who are on social networking sites, a small but growing number claim to be following brands on these platforms.

“This indicates that no single brand ‘owns’ the social media space and that the opportunity to become a ‘social’ brand is overwhelming. Given that, having a social media presence connotes ‘innovation’ ‘customer friendliness’ and a sense of ‘cool,’ brands should only ignore this aspect at their own peril,” continued Terron.

Brand engagement through social media on the rise
Nearly 40 million Indians are using online reviews to inform purchase decisions – 67 percent of Indians who are on the web use online reviews to help them make purchases. As personal opinion gains currency on the social web, online users are seeking various outlets to express themselves, be it blogs or social media sites.

Increasingly, Indians also want brands to communicate with them using social media. 60 percent Indians who are social media users are open to being approached by brands indicating that social media has the ability to change the dynamic between brands and consumers who are typically time-starved and may consider traditional forms of advertising obtrusive and undesirable.

This emerging behavior points to the fact that brands need to deliver on consumer expectations much more than ever before, in a world where consumer opinion and brand advocacy, or criticism propagates through social networks much faster than ever before.

About the study
The study was conducted through on an online survey on a sample population of 2000 people from all walks of life spread across top five metros and Tier 1 cities in India. The survey was administered across the country via India Speaks, a proprietary internet based panel managed by AbsolutData Research & Analytics.

Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from 15.8 percent just a year ago (43 percent increase) according to new research released today from The Nielsen Company. The research revealed that Americans spend a third their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging.

“Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities – social networking, playing games and emailing leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie,” said Nielsen analyst Dave Martin.

Additional findings include:

• Online games overtook personal email to become the second most heavily used activity behind social networks – accounting for 10 percent of all U.S. Internet time. Email dropped from 11.5 percent of time to 8.3 percent. (Source: Nielsen NetView)
• Of the most heavily-used sectors, Videos/Movies (which includes video-specific and movie-related websites only – and is not inclusive of video streaming behavior elsewhere) was the only other to experience a significant growth in share of U.S. activity online. Its share of activity grew relatively by 12 percent from 3.5 to 3.9 percent. (Source: Nielsen NetView)
• June 2010 was a major milestone for U.S. online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark. The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month. (Source: Nielsen VideoCensus)
• Despite some predictions otherwise, the rise of social networking hasn’t pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time. (Source: Nielsen NetView)
• Although the major portals also experienced a double digit decline in share, they remained as the fourth heaviest activity, accounting for 4.4 percent of U.S. time online. (Source: Nielsen NetView)

Email Remains Top on Mobile Internet Activities
The way U.S. consumers spend their Internet time on their mobile phones paints a slightly different picture to that of Internet use from computers. In a Nielsen survey of mobile web users, there is a double-digit (28 percent) rise in the prevalence of social networking behavior, but the dominance of email activity on mobile devices continue with an increase from 37.4 percent to 41.6 percent of U.S. mobile Internet time.

Portals remain as the second heaviest activity on mobile Internet (11.6 percent share of time), despite their double digit decline and social networking’s rise to account for 10.5 percent share means the gap is much smaller than a year ago (14.3 percent vs. 8.3 percent).

Other mobile Internet activities seeing significant growth include music and video/movies, both seeing 20 percent plus increases in share of activity year over year. As these destinations gain share, it’s at the cost of other content consumption – both news/current events and sports destinations saw more than a 20 percent drop in share of U.S. mobile Internet time.

“Although we see similar characteristics amongst PC and mobile internet use, the way their activity is allocated is still pretty contrasting, added Martin. While convergence will continue, the unique characteristics of computers and mobiles, both in their features and when and where they are used mean that mobile Internet behavior mirroring its PC counterpart is still some way off.”

NOTE: This piece of research looked at the share of all U.S. Internet time each of the 84 “standard” NetView subcategories/sectors holds. Only the top 10 sectors were actually called out, the remaining 74 were grouped into “other” and not called out.

The Mobile Internet data is derived from a survey which tracks self-reported mobile internet usage from over 5,000 respondents each month.  Mobile internet universe is defined as people that they have used the mobile internet, email or instant messaging on their mobile phone in the past 30 days. The Mobile internet data is weighted back to benchmarks for age, gender, income, race/ethnicity and operator share collected in Mobile Insights.

In the past, we discussed ways that social media has transformed the internet, having been so bold to say that social networks fundamentally changed the way we consume online media. So, if social media and social networks are these all-powerful game changers, shouldn’t they eventually make a newsworthy impact on email, the internet’s original “killer app?”

We decided to churn some quick data to test our hypothesis that “Consumption of social media decreases email use.” First, we broke the online population into four groups. The first three are terciles of social media consumption in minutes. The fourth is a group that doesn’t use social media at all. We then looked at each segment’s time of web based email consumption over the course of a year. Finally, we subtracted the email consumption of those that do not use social media from those that do, basically to show a lift over possible external forces. Clearly, there are more robust approaches that could be taken (controlling for factors other than consumption for example) but for the sake of this simple experiment, we tried to keep it straightforward.

Here’s what we found:

At least from this small experiment our hypothesis was disproved, but interesting nonetheless.  It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed – particularly for the highest social media users. Intuitively this makes some sense.  Social media sites like Facebook send messages to your inbox every time someone comments on your posting or something you’ve participated in, and depending on your settings, can send updates on almost every activity.  Also, it’s perfectly logical that as people make connections though social media, they maintain those connections outside of the specific platform and may extend those connections to email, a phone conversation or even in-person meetings.

This modest kitchen sink experiment further stoked our curiosity; the next step is to take a more robust approach to develop correlations between platforms to understand if this relationship is different across specific demographics and behavioral groups – rather than by levels of consumption.

If you have other theories or questions, we’d love to see your comments or questions below. Of course, you can contact us by email or social media.

In contrast, John McCain’s campaign has largely eschewed mobile marketing.  But that may just be the right strategy, according to Nielsen Mobile, which reported Monday that mobile advertising is a more efficient way to reach Democrats, rather than Republicans.

As of the second quarter of 2008, mobile media of all types were slightly more popular among Democrats, who were more likely than their Republican counterparts to use data services on their mobile phones, send text messages, or use mobile Internet, according to Nielsen.

View the full media alert.

Read coverage of Nielsen’s findings in MediaPost, Wireless and Mobile News, and Fierce Mobile Content.

But while mobile media use has grown rapidly in recent years, mobile advertising has been slow to take hold, Nielsen Mobile reported in a white paper released Tuesday.

In the U.S., some 76.8 million mobile users recall seeing advertising on their phones, according to Nielsen, but 63% report encountering mobile ads only infrequently — once a month or less.  Meanwhile, less than two-thirds of website homepage page views feature mobile advertising.

Lack of awareness of the size of the U.S. mobile audience, the complexity of the mobile marketing ecosystem, and advertisers’ reluctance to invest in mobile advertising are among the key factors restricting mobile ad growth, Nielsen’s analysts note.

View the full white paper.

Read MediaPost’s coverage of Nielsen’s findings.

Learn more about the outlook for mobile advertising – check out VentureBeat’s Q&A with Nielsen’s Senior Vice President of Mobile Media, Jesse Goranson