ShareChat aims to double monthly active users to 120mn by next December
ShareChat Chief Business Officer, Sunil Kamath, talks about how brands can benefit from the platform’s regional reach and scale, as it opens its doors to advertisers
While regional may be the buzzword today, ShareChat saw the potential in the vernacular way back in 2015. The social media platform was the brainchild of three IITians, Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan, and Bhanu Singh. Their bet on a non–English platform made exclusively for ‘Bharat’ paid off. ShareChat now boasts of 60 million monthly active users, it is home to 15 Indic languages and the platform claims to have a 23-24 minutes daily average user spend on it.
Interestingly, social media giant Twitter also seems to believe in ShareChat’s growth story, their Series D round of funding raised $100 million led by Twitter in August, earlier this year.
As ShareChat continues to fatten its user base, it recently decided to monetise the platform. exchange4media caught up with Sharechat's Chief Business Officer Sunil Kamath to understand what it can offer brands and advertisers on the platform. “Monetization is a broad term. We are currently focused on driving advertising with brands. The journey has just begun a couple of months back. And we've already seen some very favourable response from brands already," Kamath elaborated.
Talking about how the platform’s regional flavour can also be its USP for brands, he adds, “We're a non-English social platform. Brands are very interested to reach out to that audience and only ShareChat can offer the user-engagement that brands need beyond metros and Tier I cities. With ShareChat’s scale and reach among the native language speaking population, it has become very interesting for brands. We have been actively working with some of the brands and agencies to get this conversation around regional social media users on the ShareChat platform.”
For now the platform is not using the tried and tested route of traditional advertising, instead, it is luring brands with the might of its micro-influencer community. Kamath is of the firm belief that UGC (User Generated Content) is far more effective for brands looking to convince consumers about their products, in a language that consumers understand and through people they can relate to. He explains, “Since this is a user-generated content platform, brands are actually having a more native or organic way of getting their message out there. Instead of going the traditional way of selling ads via inventories on the platform, we get our micro-influencers to really talk about the brand in the way they understand brands. This is precisely the reason why ShareChat is extremely popular. People feel very connected to each other in their native language, and they feel that they are a part of the conversation. That is why when a user talks about the brand, it’s far more convincing than maybe getting some top-notch celebrities talking about the same brand. Therefore, when micro-influencer talks about the benefits and why would that brand be relevant for him, that encourages other users on the platform to take notice of what he/she has spoken about.”
Even though it’s early days for ShareChat in its efforts to rope in brands, Kamath shares a successful case study of MTR Foods that ran a campaign on the ShareChat platform with the intent of targeting its Telugu users in the Andhra and Telangana markets. With over 2000 user-generated content shared using the MTR product, it drove a significant amount of video views for the brand and the campaign surpassed expectations. “If you're a national brand who wants to go pan India, then the brand would really have to look at ShareChat as a possible platform which is able to get the brand message across 15 Indian languages, by hundreds of thousands of micro-influencers, reaching millions of potential consumers. That's the scale of the platform. That’s’ the impact ShareChat can create,” he says.
When the question of regional markets, UGC and social media stacks up, the obvious question that arises then is how ShareChat intends competing for brand attention vis-a-vis TikTok, which also commands a significant user base in Tier2 and Tier 3 markets. Kamath stressed that they are not competing with any other existing internet platforms, “It would be unfair for me to comment about anyone else, which I am not privy to. However, I would like to stress the fact that no other medium in India can offer brand experience with the advantage of native language, and that too, with this scale.”
Instead, Kamath adds, "ShareChat is focussed on driving its business strategy and staying relevant for the next billion Internet users who are coming on board, and this is more exciting than looking around for strategy from other companies. As I said, we started 4 years back and our learnings have pretty much been from the ground up. We believe in those learnings, and execute those learnings in the market through our products.”
Kamath, however, was not willing to divulge details on the ShareChat’s marketing strategy, he did, however, share the company’s roadmap for the year ahead, “Presently, we have 60-million monthly active users, and our goal is to get to 120 million monthly active users by December next year. All I can say is our marketing strategy is aligned with that roadmap.”
