Social media growth in India-pandemic and beyond Taneja Avina* Research Scholar, Department of Extension and Communication, SNDT University, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India *Email id: avina.taneja@gmail.com
Online published on 12 April, 2023. Abstract Pandemic and social media are altering the way people are communicating and the way they are consuming information, news and products. News is updated every second and has moved from the newspaper to the 240 letters on Twitter to Inshorts. Communication has moved from chatting to using photos and emoticons. Face to Face interactions have long been replaced by social networking applications, to a sort of social displacement. Pandemic brought many new opportunities in terms of virtual meetings and the ease of doing business. The trends that started as alternatives are now gradually becoming mainstream. It is also revolutionizing consumer behaviour and shifting the focus to ‘must haves’ on our shopping lists. It is allowing interaction, dialogue and the number of social media platforms that were engaged during pandemic for interacting, sharing information, shopping have created a parallel world for consumers. The objective of the paper is to examine if the social media expansion took place in India during and post pandemic. It's a review based paper using data from multiple sources. The social media universe is very vast as it today touches nearly all aspects of our life. Researcher has chosen to highlight the growth in three verticals, namely: 1) Online Entertainment (OTT) 2) S-commerce and 3) Online education. The paper concludes that multiple social media applications made a headway into these sectors. Top Keywords Pandemic, Social media, Disruption, Online shopping, Online entertainment, Online communication, Growth of social media platforms. Top |