Pingdom’s recent post about Social Network Popularity Around The World has created quite a bit of buzz. This mini-study looked at the popularity of some well-known social networks around the world. An important thing to remember is that this study was based on search and not by the number of users for each of these social networks. Where did they look for the regional popularity of social networks? Google Insight For Search. According to Pingdom: “This “regional interest” should give a good indication of which regions (in this case countries) a social network is most popular in.”

The study looked at the local popularity of social media and some of the results were quite surprising like Japan topping the countries when it comes to Twitter. I suspect one of the biggest surprises was that India topped the list for LinkedIn. But, this does not mean that India has the most number of Linkedin users. I believe Orkut has the most number of users in India, and Facebook is fast gaining traction.

I drilled down into the Linked search results for India and looked at the regional level. What were the top 10 Indian states that searched for Linkedin?

Haryana tops the list. This is no surprise since Gurgaon is the BPO capital of India and has thousands of IT savvy folks working for various companies.

Karnataka: I suspect Bangalore aka Silicon Valley of India tops the list here. Bangalore is hub of IT companies and startups. A significant portion of the population has Internet access both at work and home and through their phones.

Maharashtra: Mumbai and Pune maybe driving the traffic in these two cities. Mumbai is the finance and media capital of India and home to a handful of VC firms. Mumbai also has its fair share of
gaming and mobile companies. Powai is the BPO hub and home to IIT, Mumbai. Pune, on the other hand is a fast growing city with its fair share of IT-related companies. For some reason Pune has a concentration of data mining companies.

Delhi and Uttar Pradesh come next. I am clubbing the two places together since I suspect Noida in Uttar Pradesh must be skewing the results here.

What was really surprising is that Tamil Nadu ranks 7th in the list. I say surprising since Tamil Nadu has a fairly IT savvy crowd located in Chennai, Coimbatore and Madurai areas.

Next, I drilled down a bit deeper into a city-wise comparison and then you get a different picture and some of my earlier observations were validated here. The top 5 cities are:

Bangalore
Mahape
Mumbai
Noida
Delhi

Now, this tells a different story. It is not surprising that Bangalore tops the list followed by Mahape in Navi Mumbai and then Mumbai. So, I was kind of right in guessing that Mumbai would be driving the traffic in Maharashtra. What is surprising is that Chennai was again at the bottom of the list.

Now, if you revisit the data again a couple of things become very clear. First, a high percentage of the people are probably accessing their Internet connection at work, and not at home. I think it is safe to make that assumption. India still has less than 5 million broadband users and for many people the primary access point to the net is through their work place. Second, I think there is a fair bit of cross-pollination and word of mouth working at work here. By cross-pollination I mean people who travel back and forth between India and the US or have friends, classmates and family in the US through whom they might have heard about LinkedIn. Third, this is still a keyword search and does not say anything about the number of users etc. Also, the search is Google-specific and precludes other search engines like Yahoo! and MSN.

I think India is a great testbed for viral marketing. Remember Hotmail and how India topped the chart in the number of Hotmail users? A similar trend may be at work here, where people want to check out Linkedin before creating an account there. I won’t be surprised if by the end of the year the number of Linked subscription from India sees a significant growth.

Related Post: Are You On Linked?

Technorati Tags: linkedin,pingdom,social media,socical networks,ideas,web 2.0,technology,india linkedin in india