With 217 million Indian users, Facebook to help businesses drive growth

Mumbai: Facebook with over 217 million monthly active users in India is closely working with marketers and advertisers to discuss how the social media giant can help businesses drive growth.

With 2.1 billion monthly active users globally, Facebook currently has 212 million monthly active users on smartphones in the country.

"With over 217 million monthly active users in India -- most of whom are active on mobile -- Facebook is at the heart of a mobile-first shopping journey. We want to help all marketers and businesses drive revenue growth by tapping into the shift in consumer behavior towards mobile, and help them adopt practises to drive both penetration and loyalty," informed Sandeep Bhushan, Director, India and South Asia, at an event here.

Addressing the needs of industry, Facebook hosted "Discover Growth" event here which brought together marketers and advertisers to discuss key strategies focused on growth marketing.

The participants gained an in-depth insight into Facebook`s mobile solutions that can help marketers grow and engage consumers efficiently.

Some of the top strategies included acquiring customers and generate intent, creativity and measuring what matters.

"Facebook`s people-based measurement solutions can help measure what`s working across channels to enable optimised spending to those attributing to the best results," the company said.

Brands and businesses across industries in India are already taking advantage of Facebook`s full-funnel marketing solutions. 

E-commerce and travel brands such as Jabong, Shopclues and MakeMyTrip have used "Dynamic Ads" to capitalise on intent and find interested customers. 

With Facebook`s "Lead" ads, brands like Raymond and Mahindra have been able to drive offline sales while others like GSK, Vodafone, Mondelez and Myntra have leveraged Facebook`s measurement solutions to refine their marketing spends.

"Facebook in no time (within a period of six months) has become one of the key contributors to our business for orders from retargeting channels," said Saujanya Shrivastava, Group CMO (MakeMyTrip.com and Goibibo.com).

According to Siddharth Banerjee, EVP-Brand Communications and Insights, Vodafone, partnering with Facebook on the launch campaign for Vodafone Supernet 4G helped them cut build awareness with the right audience.

"With the target audience leaning towards digital, Facebook delivered some of the highest impact across all media vehicles on driving salience and key brand messages," Banerjee said.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp has over 200 million monthly active users in India.