Home-grown social media platforms are trying to cash in on the next wave of internet users, a vast majority of whom are expected to be non-English speakers.

Vokal, a Bengaluru-based regional language social media platform, has rolled out its platform in 10 languages.

The platform will be available in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Oriya and Assamese. Talking to BusinessLine , Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder of Vokal, said that since its initial launch in English, the platform has seen two million active monthly users. Radhakrishna — who founded TaxiForSure, which was taken over by Ola — hopes that with this venture, he can achieve similar success. “The initial adoption has been positive and we expect to see 20-30 per cent monthly user growth,” he said.

In Vokal, users can ask questions and get them answered in regional languages by volunteers on the platform. Currently, most of the answers are in video and audio formats.

Vokal is similar to Quora, a platform that is widely successful in the West, wherein a person can ask a question and a community of users give its answers. In September 2018, Quora reported that it has 300 million monthly users, and was valued at $1.8 billion.

Growing potential

Another Bengaluru-based start-up, Mohalla Tech, which runs ShareChat, a vernacular social and content platform, is betting big too. It raised ₹720 crore last September from investors such as Xiaomi, Shunwei Capital, and Jesmond Holdings, an affiliate of Russian billionaire Yuri Milner’s DST Global, amongst others. In India, English has been the mode for internet consumption. Currently, the country has around 550 million internet users, and with data becoming cheap, industry watchers expect a large number of first-time users — who have never used any other device, except a mobile phone — to emerge as potential customers.

“We are designing a different experience for these users,” said Radhakrishna. As an example, he cites the fact that many users are not used to QWERTY keyboards. For these users, Vokal is building voice input-enabled mechanisms.

Non-verbal communication

Voice as a medium of communication is beginning to make inroads. “We found that a large number of non-English language speakers communicate through voice and emojis, rather than text,” said Manish Jha, CEO of Saveyra, a company that makes stickers and emojis.

With these kind of initiatives, Radhakrishna is eyeing 100 million users within by 2021. These users are expected to generate revenues for Vokal — either through online advertising or targeted marketing campaigns.

According to Hansveen Kaur, Business Head, Momspresso Bharat, a regional language digital agency, there is enough data to suggest that the next content wave in India will be driven by regional language content, with nine out of 10 new internet users in the next five years projected to be Indian language users.

India is expected to see strong growth in social media and content users in next few years, with 200 million more users expected to be added till 2022, according to RedSeer Consulting. Currently, this market has a duopoly — Google and Facebook. The digital advertising market at the end of last year was pegged at $3 billion, according to RedSeer Consulting.

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