Wednesday, 23 May 2012
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India releases social media strategy draft
The Department of Information Technology has released a draft social media strategy for the India government, providing a basic framework and guidelines for use of social media by agencies.
The Framework & Guidelines for Use of Social Media for Government Organisation hopes to help the government enhance its outreach, engage and interact with the 84 per cent of Indian internet users on sites such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter.
Orkut now has 18 million indian users while Facebook has 17 million and Twitter has 4.5 million but is “rapidly spreading in India”.
“These sites offer an opportunity to reach out to this audience at a key stroke,” states the paper.
“Social networking sites have emerged as a strong platform for interaction between the people. But, government officers are still not using them to seek public opinion on various government’s policies and projects due to lack of certain policy for the same,” said Shankar Aggarwal, Additional Secretary, Department of Information Technology (DIT).
“As this kind of platform can be a best tool for the purpose, we are considering development of such platform with a policy framework for the same in due course.”
DIT has suggested that social media, apart from communicating information and gathering feedback, can also be used to gather “direct feedback on the issues from the common man” for policy making purposes.
The strategy suggests that Facebook Pages must be updated at least a couple of times a week and Twitter, “slightly more frequently”.
Ideally, none of the sites should be left more than a week or two without new content, advised the strategy.
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3 Comments
On 13 September 2011 Mayur Milan wrote:
The data used in this article is absolutely incorrect and out dated.
Facebook has out grown Orkut long back. There are 30 million plus users on Facebook in India.
Twitter too has out grown the number indicated in this article.
Please do proper statistic research before posting.
On 15 September 2011 Xinghui Guo wrote:
Dear Mayur,
I understand your concern as there are two different sets of numbers mentioned on various websites and articles. The figures in this article were taken from the draft strategy itself, which I take to be the most official.
On 11 October 2011 kpnd wrote:
By our guesswork, we have arrived at a figure of 4 million blogs in India Often the same person often is active in more than one platform including blogs, FB, Orkut, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.
Next, the draft is for government only, not for the general public. Your link is correct but the title gives slightly wrong impression.