Tweets & Facebook posts in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil get more responses than those in English

NEW DELHI: Coca-Cola posted its first tweet in Hindi last fortnight when the International Premier Tennis League was being held in New Delhi, and it got it 350 retweets compared to just 10-15 retweets of most of its English tweets.
Nobody’s surprised. There’s a substantial increase in use of Indian languages on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, and several large and small advertisers including PepsiCo, Bharti Airtel, suiting brand OCM and winery Sula Vineyards say use of regional languages in social media campaigns give them much higher resonance than the same thing in English.

According to social media agencies, brands’ Facebook posts using Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil and Marathi get almost 150% more response than similar English posts, thanks to increasing penetration of Internet into smaller towns and cities.

“Language is surely helping a better engagement,” said Anusha Shetty, CEO at Autumn Worldwide, a Bangalore-based advertising agency specializing in social media. “This approach will start playing an important role in the next two years as Internet penetration increases and more people from tier 3 and 4 (cities) join the social space,” she said. “We are seeing the birth of this approach now.”

Shetty said sprinkling languages such as Hindi, Malayalam or Tamil boosts engagement from consumers by 160% to 220%.

Autumn Worldwide recently did a social media campaign for apparel brand OCM with a mixed language approach to target audience from tier II cities.

For a recent Luminous ad, the video content on Facebook was in Hindi, which got replies in ‘Hinglish’, leading to ‘massive engagement’. PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew recently had a campaign in the south with one Tamil word in it, while Orient Electric had a campaign with Chennai Super Kings with Hindi words.

All these campaigns received good response on the social media.

Aneesh Madani, head of sports partnerships at Twitter India, said there has been 300% increase in tweets in Hindi in 2014 alone. “Given that Twitter now renders in all Indian languages and the fact that India is one of the fastest growing user bases for Twitter worldwide, we will see an upward trend in vernacular conversations,” he said.

“Brands and partners are starting to explore the vernacular and the opportunity to stand out while connecting to users is ripe,” Madani said. “Expect more during the ICC Cricket World Cup as well as the Indian Premier League.”

Coca-Cola’s recent experiment on a refreshment-based post in Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil and Kannada got over 150% response compared to the same post published in English. “We are being able to engage in a dialogue with consumers in their language of choice, rather than just pushing one way communication,” said Debabrata Mukherjee, vice president for, marketing and commercial at Coca-Cola.

According to Mindshift Interactive, 64% of rural internet users — or, 24.3 million out of 38 million users — use the internet in their local language, and that vernacular sites are growing at 56% year-on-year, while English sites are growing by just 11%.

A joint study by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International said regional language content availability can boost the growth of Internet in India by 24%.

No wonder, brands are looking to increase their engagement in Indian languages.

Rishi Dogra, head of digital marketing at PepsiCo India, said the firm is actively evaluating the opportunity of using regional languages for engagement on all social media platforms.

Salil Kapoor, COO of Dish TV, said all promotions of its brand Zing Digital, a DTH platform for regional channels, including on social media are being conceptualised in regional languages.

Pan Vilas mouth fresheners, endorsed by actor Shah Rukh Khan, has told its social media agency Gozoop to communicate only in local languages next year to get tier 2 and 3 audiences engaged.

Gozoop has started to optimise content for social media in vernacular languages, as those on social media tend to reply to posts in local languages, said its co-founder Ahmed Naqvi. “During events or matches, the engagement is much higher when we translate our tweets and sometimes can take the engagement up to 200% for our posts,” he said.

Zafar Rais, CEO at digital agency Mindshift Interactive, said wine maker Sula Vineyards got significantly higher consumer response when tweets were sent in Marathi.

He also pointed out that advertisers’ cost per click goes down when they use regional languages, from about Rs 6 to Rs 4. “A lot of brands which reach out to regional audiences — for example, Airtel — are now interacting in regional languages like Hindi and Marathi to get to better costs per click,” Rais said.

Last fortnight, Google introduced Hindi ads on its display network, pointing out that there are more than 500 million Hindi speakers around the world. “We’re excited to launch support for Hindi, which will enable global advertisers to connect with one of India’s fastest growing online audiences,” the Internet giant said in a statement.

Google launched its translator in Hindi in 2007 and its Hindi portal in 2009. In September 2011, Twitter launched regional content delivery in Hindi. Google and Facebook o?er search in nine Indian languages — Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada or Malayalam.