Bhubaneswar tops in use of social networking sites in India

Youths in Bhubaneswar have left behind other cities of India when it comes to using social networking sites.

TCS GenY Survey 2014-15 has revealed that 92 per cent of Bhubaneswar’s youths use social networking sites, the highest in the country.

Tata Consultancy Services has conducted a survey across 14 cities – Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Indore, Kochi, Calcutta, Lucknow, Mumbai, Nagpur and Pune – with 12,365 high school students between the age group of 12 and 18 among respondents.

Key Highlights

• Topmost city in terms of usage of social networking websites (92%).
• Facebook is the most popular social networking site (93%).
• Twitter usage found highest across cities in Bhubaneshwar (and Lucknow) with about half of the students reporting usage.
• For students, ‘staying connected with family’ and ‘being part of community (e.g. photography, football etc.)’ came up as the most prominent reasons for using social networking sites – by over half of the respondents.
• Sports personalities rule Twitter, followed by celebrities and film stars who are the most followed people on Twitter in Bhubaneswar (69%; 60%; 57% respectively).
• Almost half reported parental monitoring of their online activities. Out of those parents who monitored, more than half also had access to their ward’s account on social networking sites.
• E-commerce quite popular, about 3/4th of the students shop online.
• Online shopping is relatively more popular among the girls.
• Books are by far the most sought after item of online purchase (64%).
• About 6 in 10 respondents use FaceTime/ Skype/ Google Hangout/video chat.
• WhatsApp is the most popular IM platform – used over half of the students (52%). Usage among boys much higher than that among girls (by 40 percentage points).
• Online sources are fairly popular for studies among students in Bhubaneshwar. “Online resources like Wikipedia” and PDFs are used by majority of them (59%; 54% respectively).
• 7 among every 10 students use television or newspapers to keep abreast with current affairs/ news; 56% utilized online sources.