‘Many consumer brands are exploring the platform to connect with language-first audience’

For Sharechat, 2020 was a year of high growth as they saw a 166% spike in active user base on the platform in a calendar year. Ajit Varghese, Chief Commercial Officer at ShareChat, spoke to e4m about how the homegrown social media platform added not just users but also brands from across the spectrum. Varghese also mentioned how the app that was originally targeted towards Tier II cities is making inroads into Tier I cities with the significant increase in consumption from the areas.

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It’s been almost half a year since indigenous apps have been at the forefront ruling the UGC space, tell us about the kind of growth ShareChat has seen?

ShareChat was launched in 2015 and over these six years, we have evolved to become India’s preferred online destination. Back in 2015, there were social media platforms existing in India but all of them were in English and were complicated. Indian, language-first internet users found it tough to be expressive in English and also, connect culturally. We saw a gap in the social media landscape early on and addressed the opportunity with our Indic language product offering.

ShareChat allows users to share their opinions, record their lives and make new friends - all within the comfort of their native language. As the platform operates in 15 Indian languages, our community of users have the liberty to express themselves and their creativity freely, without any inhibitions of being judged. While enabling social networking, ShareChat also allows users to chat, do commerce, access verified information, news, and digital content. 

Over the last year, we have witnessed exponential growth. ShareChat is spearheading India's internet revolution, it is changing how the next billion users will interact on the internet. Our monthly active users jumped from 60 million at the beginning of 2020 to 160 million at present, which is a spike of 166%. Over these months, the daily average user time spent on the platform has also increased from 24 minutes to 31 minutes. 

Previously most of our traffic originated from Tier 2 cities and further, suddenly we witnessed a significant increase in user base from metros and Tier I cities as well. This highlights the fact that language-first internet users are emerging across the country and not limited to only Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. 

How prepared are you with the ad tech capabilities to address this surge in brands' interest?

With a large community of 160 million monthly active users, we provide brands the unique opportunity to reach unexplored markets in the deepest parts of the country and engage with users effectively. We have built our ad tech solutions after evaluating brands’ needs and understanding consumer behavior insights that we have gathered over the years.

Apart from traditional digital marketing solutions like video/banner ads, we offer native ad formats, Influencer led conversational ads, user-generated content, creator led ads, hashtags and impact options.

We have built a robust ad-tech platform to help brands reach scale, with native advertising in video and banner assets, and drive impact through the homepage pinned post, customized for every brand, which gets visible to the targeted users as the first post on their homepage. 

As brands demanded high impact for their campaigns on the platform, we introduced the idea of exit interstitial, which appears to the targeted users while exiting the platform. This generally includes a banner or a 6-second video. 

Have marketers taken to ShareChat? What are the kinds of brands that you are working with?

We have witnessed immense interest since we opened our platform for brand integrations. Today, ShareChat is silently leading the social media revolution with brands focusing on regional outreach. We are engaging with hyperlocal brands, as well as helping established brands reach a wider audience through local language-focused advertising campaigns. We intend to deliver brands’ messaging to their relevant audiences at every possible touchpoint and make them aware of the brand’s propositions.  

Our strength in language-first markets, matched with our ad solutions, is opening new marketing avenues for marketers who want to connect with audiences in their regional language and take their products deeper into the country. Leading brands from every B2C category are actively exploring the endless possibilities on ShareChat.

Since the past year, we have successfully been executing more than 50 campaigns every month, spread across diverse market segments. We have worked with 100+ brands including the likes of Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Facebook, Coca-Cola, Oyo, Snapdeal, MTR, Airtel, Pepsi, Realme, Marico, Godrej, TVS, Dream11, Vodafone, etc. 

In terms of revenue, what kind of growth are you expecting? Tell us about your plans for monetization?

Brands want to reach out to the unexplored language-dominated market, and today, only ShareChat has the capabilities to offer the required user engagement that brands need beyond metros and Tier I cities. ShareChat has been included in AOP (Annual Operating Plan) by every leading digital media agency. 

ShareChat has already developed immense brand confidence and many leading consumer brands are exploring the platform to connect with language-first audiences. This offers a unique proposition to the brands to connect with people in their native language and drive customized campaigns in one or more languages targeting only the relevant audience.

We already have seen very favorable responses from brands. It’s barely been a year since we started monetization, and over 150 brands have signed up with us and worked with us on multiple occasions. We aim to accelerate the reach of the platform, innovate constantly and build monetization opportunities while enhancing the overall social experience for our community.  

Which are your immediate focus areas this year? Tell us about the best-performing markets and the new markets that might have emerged on the UGC radar. 

ShareChat has already emerged as the preferred online destination for Bharat with its 160 million monthly active users. Our immediate priority is to make the user experience more personalized, elevate content quality by nurturing the creator community and build monetization models that benefit brands, creators, and our user community simultaneously.

Our aim is to create a healthy ecosystem that empowers brands to reach, interact, engage and grow by connecting with audiences in Indic languages. Our reach within the deepest parts of the country is helping us convert the brand's marketing messaging into engaging relevant content and ad formats that are native to language-first feed. 

Our focus is to drive technology-powered solutions, by employing user insights to train AI-enabled models and improve the relevance of ads shown to our community. We further plan to strengthen our in-house ad solutions with better brand integrations to co-create technology-led innovations.