Social Samosa - Aiming to be the one stop shop for Indian Social Media News and Reviews

Social Samosa is a one stop shop for all the social media info in the Indian context. Swati Maheshwari talks to Mumbai based entrepreneur Ankita Gaba to find out more about her second entrepreneurial venture.Social Samosa in a nutshell

Social Samosa hopes to become a repository of thoughts, ideas, case studies, how to's and dialogue about/on the social media scenario in India. The portal aims to be an enabler of growth of an individual, a brand or an organization within the industry.

Idea that led to starting up of Social Samosa

The social media industry in India is growing by leaps and bounds. While consumers realized that they could do a lot on and with social media very early, brands are now realizing this too. There was a lot of good work happening and all records of it were being put up on individual sites and blogs. Not all users had easy access to it and not all brands and businesses were able to show their good work to a larger audience base.

Also with the increase in social media usage, a lot of people wanted to build careers in it. Entrepreneurs too wanted to use social media for their businesses but most didn't know where to start from, or how to keep themselves updated. We saw this gap and decided to negate it. Since both of us (the founders; Aditya Gupta and I) are from the social media industry and have been involved with a variety of social media projects, this seemed like the next logical step to take.

Value Proposition

Our prime offering is a value in itself. We aspire to become the "Go to" place for everything and anything to do with social media. We aim to make our portal such that people should either get inspired or should learn enough from it to start using social media on their own for their businesses, jobs or themselves.

We also wish to start listing social media jobs, agencies and events soon, so we can start working towards getting the industry more organized.

Content will be a key element in your business. How do you plan to create/source content?

We have a set of dedicated writers who are from the industry. We share a list of topics with them to write on and they submit content after detailed research and inputs from the industry stalwarts. We also have a lot of contributors who are experts in this domain and want to support the initiative.

In parallel, we reach out to agencies and brands to submit their case studies to us.

Revenue Model

We are looking at ads for now. Soon we would like to start with jobs and events listings.

Founding team This is the second entrepreneurial venture for both of us. In the past, I started one of the first Social media agencies in India by the name Superchooha. Post that, I moved on to training startups in their social media, marketing and process efforts.

My partner, Aditya Gupta, co-founded and runs iGenero - a web, mobile, branding and social media agency. Aditya takes care of the branding and social media vertical.

While I work from Mumbai, Aditya operates from Hyderabad.

India and Social Media

Social media is a natural extension of how we Indian's communicate. We always loved our local communities and had addas in our buildings, societies, schools, colleges and offices. We just took all that online and expanded our circles. When masses started adopting social media, brands couldn't lag behind.

Nearly 30 million Indians who are online consumers are members of social networking sites according to the Nielsen Company report of a research study it conducted in collaboration with AbsolutData. It might seem like a small number when we compare it to the masses that still follow traditional media, but it is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Social Samosa's take on Social Media

We think social media will certainly go mobile with the increase in the usage of smart phones in India. A term already catching up in this context is SoLoMo – Social, Local, Mobile. More brands will hop on and use social media to reach out to their customers.

Check out http://www.socialsamosa.com/ for further details

- Swati Maheshwari