The closing keynote of ad:tech 2012 Day 1 was given by Gian Fulgoni, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of comScore. He provided an overview of the current digital landscape in India and highlighted key issues such as the use of mobile devices, social media and video to understand how these rapidly evolving activities are driving future trends.
He presented some stats about internet users according to comScore’s studies including:
- There are currently 1.5 billion internet users globally.
- Internet users spend 1 out of every 5 minutes online on social networking sites.
- 75% internet users in India are under the age of 35, as compared to 52% globally.
One of the most key learnings for brands from his presentation is the study showing that once people like a brand page on Facebook or any other social networking site, they don’t usually go back to it, so content that is posted on brand pages rarely gets seen. He gave the example of Oreo cookie’s Facebook brand page which has 24 million fans (at the time of the study), but only sees about 39,000 visits in a month.
So it’s important to put communication out into the users’ news feeds because that’s where it has an impact. A brand’s reach increases by as much as 33% if the content is propagated by friends. A user is more likely to visit a brand’s website if a link is shared by someone in their his friend circle and it appears in his news feed.
“If you get from somebody that you know a recommendation on something, this would persuade you more than if that recommendation came straight from the brand itself. I think that’s one of the basic learnings that we’ve got here in this digital world.”
Gian’s closing remarks for brands were, to build their fan base by providing new incentives for people to like the content, and in this way increase their reach.
