How ShareChat is helping local brands with language-focused advertising

As regional language media consumption soars during the lockdown, social media app ShareChat goes full throttle with brand integrations

Local language social media platform ShareChat is engaging with hyperlocal brands, as well as helping established brands reach a wider audience through local language focused advertising campaigns, as its monetisation strategy takes hold. And at a time when brands are struggling to keep customers engaged in a meaningful manner, they find that focusing on local concerns and speaking in local tongues could help bridge the gaps.

“We have been witnessing a healthy growth since we opened our platform for brand integrations,” said Sunil Kamath, chief business officer, ShareChat. “Our regional strength in Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities, coupled with our unique UGC (user generated content) proposition for brands, is opening new marketing avenues for marketers who want to connect with regional first audiences.”

Much like what video-sharing app TikTok has done, ShareChat and several others are mining the large, mobile-first market in small towns. The 2020 State of the Mobile report by App Annie, a global analytics and market intelligence firm has found that India is right on top, when it comes to app downloads. Between 2016 and 2019, there was a 190 per cent increase in downloads by Indians, which is the highest in the world. Compared to this, globally, downloads went up 45 per cent and China at second place, grew at half the pace at 80 per cent.

Break it down further and for the majority of downloaders, the internet is an entertainment zone with the time spent on entertainment apps in India growing 80 per cent between 2017 and 2019. Also mobile-first emerging markets such as Indonesia, Brazil and India continue to spend the most time in mobile each day. And France, India and Canada saw strong growth with the average user spending 25 per cent more time in mobile each day in 2019 than in 2017.

The story that these numbers tell has been in evidence for a while. However in the present state of uncertainty, it gathers even more significance. According to a report released by BARC India and Nielsen on the digital consumption, smartphone usage is inching towards nearly four hours/day, which is a 12.5 per cent increase as compared to the pre-Covid period.

For ShareChat this is an opportunity for the taking and it has, over the past few weeks, moved to ensure that verified information surfaces to the top of its trending feed, ensured priority fact checking of COVID-19 related content in over 13 languages and taken up the promotion of content by various law enforcement and government accounts on the platform.

ShareChat is also looking to build on the relationships that it has patched together in the past couple of months. Over the past six months the company said it had run 50 campaigns across diverse market segments and worked with 25+ brands including the likes of Facebook, Coca Cola, Oyo, MTR, Airtel, Pepsi, Future Group, MXPlayer and Snapdeal.

While ShareChat is working with local brands to reach out to a more language-focused audience, it is also solving a larger problem that established or global brands face while wanting to reach people in smaller markets. “The intent behind any brand to engage with ShareChat is to leverage the platform’s strength among the language-first internet users and connect with the regional audiences. While ShareChat offers flexibility to the national brands to break their national campaigns and customised as per regional flavour, regional brands focus more on native language of their region in an attempt to enforce recall within the defined user set,” said Kamath.

For example, Bhasha Dibosh is well celebrated in Bengal and Coca-Cola used the platform for a Bhasha Dibosh special for its Bengali speaking audience. “The purpose behind this campaign was to rekindle people’s lost love for writing in Bengali. It generated close to a million views in a span of 3-4 days,” said Kamath.

ShareChat supports 15 Indic languages and over 60 million monthly active users. According to the company, a user on average spends about 23 minutes per day on the app, making it an obvious draw for advertisers. Backed by Twitter among others, ShareChat has been taking several steps to reach out to a wider audience, including a foray into fantasy sports earlier this year.