Consumer Confidence Slips

Not good news for retailers. Nielsen Wire reports the re emergence of recessionary attitudes.  Their key findings are:

• 58% of global online consumers said they are still in a recession – the most in the past year. More than half believe they will still be in a recession in a year’s time.
• 31% of U.S. consumers said they have no spare cash for discretionary spending, along with 25% of Middle East/Africa consumers and 22% of Europeans.
• U.S. fell five index points to 78, two points lower than the 80 points recorded at the height of the recession in the first half of 2009.
• Indian consumers, despite a five point quarterly decline, remained the most positive.
• Largest confidence declines in Q2 were recorded in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which had enjoyed the biggest increases in Q1 2011.
• Increasing utility bills and inflation again eclipsed the economy and job security as main concerns in Europe.
• Latin America consumer confidence edges up one index point to 91.

Related articles

• U.S. Consumer Confidence Now Lower Than At Height Of Global Recession (huffingtonpost.com)
• Inflation hits consumer confidence (mirror.co.uk)

It's Simply Not (All) Cricket - Social Media In India

An online survey of 2000 people from all walks of life in India has revealed that its population now spends more time on social media than they do on email.

The Nielsen Company commissioned the survey which is shows that nearly 30 million online Indiansare members of social networking sites, with nearly two-thirds of them spending time on these daily.

Such activity continues to gain momentum in India with an estimated daily joining rate of 45,000 online Indians joining up to these sites over the next six months.

“The social web appears to have gone beyond supplementing communication. Online Indians today are using social media to facilitate activities that range from leisure like entertainment, improving their livelihood through job searches and researching prospective partners,”  Suhale Kapoor, EVP, AbsolutData is quoted as saying.

A quarter of Indians are able to recall brands from their social media interaction and while no single brand yet dominates the social media space, there is a growing number of consumers who claim to be following brands in this manner.

Three other important statistics emerge from the survey:

• 40 million Indians use online reviews to make informed purchase decisions
• 67 percent of Indian web users use online reviews to assist with purchasing decisions
• 60 percent of Indians who use social media are receptive to an approach from a brand

AbsolutData Research & Analytics conducted the survey across top five metros and Tier 1 cities.

There are some 26,691,760 Facebook users in India which represents just under 33% of the online population so clearly there isstill room more massive expansion.

The top five brands using Facebook are:

1.  Tata Docomo - the GSM arm of Tata Teleservice with 2,069,772 Fans
2.  Vodafone Zoozoos - a telco games, video site with 1,840,243 Fans
3.  Axe Angels club - cheer leaders with a deodorant and cricket twist! - 1,593,124 Fans
4. Mumbai Indians -  professonal cricket team with 1,572,847 Fans
5. Fastrack - brand of watches and graments targeting the urban youth with 1,513,096 Fans

Facebook is still very much a male activity with less than 30% being female users.

Source: Socialbakers

18-24 year olds account for almost half of all Facebook users in India with a further 29% coming from the 25-34 age demographic.

Source: Socialbakers

According to Website-Monitoring.com in April of 2010, Twitter was then getting some 3 billion requests per day generated by 180 million unique visitors.  They calculated that 8.2% of this traffic came from India.

Here are a snaphot of Twitter topics from major Indian cities on May 30th, 2011: