ShareChat Live Audio Chatrooms: Enabling Brands To Engage With Bharat Through Conversations & Storytelling
For many, their baby’s first words are a cause for happiness. It is an exciting time for the family when a baby shows progress in his/her ability to verbalize as the youngest one is ready to join the conversation.
The feel-good aspect of having a conversation is universal. It is the natural home of narrative, and remains the most familiar form of storytelling for many of us.
We have conversations, where stories are told to make a point, catch up on each other's lives, ask or answer questions, report news, and even entertain. It is certainly a bedrock for all communication. Yet brands have limited mediums to enliven this aspect, which enables them to engage with consumers through dialogue-driven, personalized experiences at a one-on-one level. This eventually leads to brands missing out on opportunities to build trust and form deeper bonds with their audience.
While stories have been a vital part of our lives since time immemorial, the modern consumer has evolved. They don't want to just consume stories, but also actively participate in them. However, few marketing mediums have caught up to this desire of the modern consumer. And ShareChat Live Audio Chatroom is one of those few mediums that profoundly helps bring alive the aspect of conversational storytelling.
ShareChat Live Audio Chatroom is India’s very own language-first audio platform with a unique two-way ‘LIVE’ interface. It allows users to interact with other users on the platform, put forward thoughts in a more immediate, personalized and relatable manner and have conversations in their preferred Indic languages.
Furthermore, the platform’s ability to aggregate audience LIVE at scale certainly makes it a clutter-breaking offering over conventional audio-only media formats that’ve been imposing standard content offerings for their listerner’s consumption. Thereby, making it a not-to-be-missed platform for the marketers.
However, the usefulness of the ShareChat Chatrooms does not end here. It offers brands and creators an opportunity to create an exclusive space and effortlessly connect with their audience, have meaningful conversations with their followers, and eventually, create an open platform to promote events, drive campaigns and even incorporate direct and indirect brand mentions — all via conversational storytelling!
Online communities driving storytelling
Chatrooms allow people to bond over common interests and hence, helps build communities. These shared interests lead to story sessions and discussions that have a palpable impact on the way content is consumed.
Chatrooms are also a safe space and a source of emotional association for many. For example, a user created a Chatroom on the occasion of Mothers’ Day which eventually developed into a sentimental space where hundreds of users shared heart-warming stories and memories about their mothers.
Another example is of two creators, Akki and Pihu from Maharashtra who connected via one of the Chatrooms. The platform played the role of a cupid for them as they fell in love and recently got married.
Sessions on the Chatroom are further fuelled by its advanced features and instant feedback loops like the real-time user comments, audio live feature and so on. While it helps create on-the-spot content, it also boosts the quality of content and enhances community engagement. Some of the most popular communities are based on some all-time favorite subjects like friendships, astrology, sports, love, cooking, shayari, music, and relationships to name a few.
In an environment dominated by face creators, ShareChat Chatrooms have become a breeding ground for a new wave of creators. It has opened up opportunities for creators who wish to leverage the convenience of an audio platform while removing the burden of being ‘camera-ready’. Thereby, enabling them to create interactive content around topics where their expertise lies and in the process, building their own community.
Chatrooms also offer these creators monetization opportunities through the virtual gifting feature and brand collaborations. The virtual gifting feature allows users to appreciate their favorite content creator with digital tokens who can convert it into monetary rewards.
In addition to monetization, Chatroom also helps content creators stay relevant and on-point with an infinite feedback loop where their audience can directly share their thoughts on their content quality. So far, Chatroom has empowered 64k content creators with digital tokens across 11 Lakh audio sessions. ShareChat’s virtual gifting feature has touched $50 million in annual recurring revenue, and that is set to more than double by year-end.
How can brands leverage these conversations and communities?
Users talk about their preferences in forums and Chatrooms, which makes these platforms an amazing source for first-hand information. Moreover, with users and content creators bonding over common subjects, there is always room for promotion and engagement.
ShareChat has a strong presence as a language - first social media platform. And Live Audio Chatroom boasts of 200 crore minutes of monthly streaming along with 1.6 Cr+ monthly active users (MAUs).
This opens up the possibility of generating cause and event-related discussions in addition to extension of existing IPs as well as creation of new ones. The combination of IPs and user-generated content can help brands enhance their engagement rate as well as their recall value.
For instance, Parimatch - an online fantasy sports platform leveraged the community based content approach via ShareChat’s Chatroom and hit their engagement rate out of the park!
Parimatch had its exclusive Chatroom with focus on the ‘Baazi Jeet Ki’ brand proposition where the experts from the cricket fraternity discussed the nail-biting events of IPL 2022 and much more. The power of sharing content enabled Chatroom users to witness candid conversations around cricket, strategies and memories from the celebrities personal lives.
Collectively, the Chatroom sessions recorded a massive live listenership of 6.9 lakhs. The campaign generated 18.3 Cr+ impressions on the platform and brand engagement via an elaborate marketing strategy, passive brand mentions by the host and jingles playing in the background. This example epitomizes how brands can leverage these transparent mediums of communication, to subtly highlight their value with the help of conversation-led storytelling.
From beauty brands to jewelry stores, brands can effortlessly create a buzz among the language first communities via the platform’s language-first approach and foster engagement in this underserved consumer segment. Leading brands like Amazon and PhonePe, alongside a host of music labels have successfully leveraged the format of ShareChat Live Audio Chatroom and tapped into ShareChat’s extensive reach among Bharat audiences.
Future of storytelling in the world of Digital Marketing
Stories have been an integral part of cultures across the globe and especially in India. And before anyone could ‘see’ them, they could ‘hear’ them. From painting imaginations to creating epic folklores, stories have brought people together from different walks of life, and audio is the secret ingredient in this recipe of connecting and growing.
Sharing anecdotes, discussing facts & news, everything stems from the spoken word or audio, which supplements an effective narrative and contributes to the essence of storytelling. Earlier, this spoken word was a part of communities that were formed in aangans, and common spaces. Today, they are available in the digital ecosystem like Chatrooms.
Having a designated space to share these stories, news and information is very crucial to weave new narratives and this is why people are drawn to Chatrooms.
With the new digital front of digital audio, Chatrooms form the foundation for auditory marketing with consumers looking for exciting content. For brands, it is time to shift away from the conventional means of targeting & marketing. They need to leverage conversational storytelling and audio content to establish trust among their audiences and connect with them on a deeper level.
