Twitter-backed regional social media platform ShareChat is betting big on its reach among vernacular audiences to drive targeted campaigns by large advertisers in local languages.
Executed by micro-influencers and user-generated content on its platform, the company has already carried campaigns by multinationals such as Facebook, Coca Cola, Pepsi along with homegrown giants like Oyo, MTR, Bharti Airtel, Future Group and Snapdeal so far.
The company which launched the advertising-led monetisation strategy in September last year is planning to massively scale it up this year, a top official told ET.
Sharechat is present in 15 local Indian languages across 800 cities in India with monthly active users of 60 million. The fact that it has content creators who can create campaigns in these languages which are aligned to regional sensitivities is giving advertisers the edge on this platform, claims the company which has plans to massively scale it up in the coming fiscal year.
Sunil Kamath, Chief Business Officer, ShareChat told ET that the platform is seeing a healthy growth since it opened up its platform for brand integrations. “Our regional strength in Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities offer a unique proposition to brands with highly targeted language-driven campaigns,” he added.
According to App Annie, a mobile app data and analytics company, ShareChat ranks among the top 10 of Indian headquartered publishers by downloads in 2019. In the last 6 months — between August 2019 to January 2020 — ShareChat has around 14 million daily average users, according to App Annie.
Kamath added that when it comes to traditional ways of advertising, it’s not very easy for brands to communicate in multiple languages at the same time since it’s a very tedious exercise in terms of cost and time.
“Änd that’s where brands are now seeing ShareChat as a potential platform. I think what excites a lot of our conversations is that it is not only hyperlocal language targeted but the element of cost and complexity of doing multi-regional launches is a lot less,” he added.
ShareChat claims to have executed campaigns for over 25 top companies in the last few months and has been getting repeat campaigns. “So those are like early signs that people are liking the concept,” said Kamath.
As per the concept, micro-influencers who have a huge fan following due to their interests in specific areas such as travel or cooking usually pick up the campaign theme of related brands and make content around it in their own regional language for their follower base.
Talking about revenues from monetisation strategy, Kamath said that it is a very early stage for the company to talk about numbers. “We haven’t yet looked at cost versus revenue kind of a success rate. I think we are building something unique and scalable. I think that is where our focus will be for this year. We definitely have seen a lot of traction. And our intent is to make it 10 times larger from here on,” he said.
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