Nitin Jai Shukla, Founder & MD at OMTV – India’s first sanatan storytelling platform, connects the dots between spirituality and social media. 

Nobody can deny that social media is impacting our lives in a bigger way. When it comes to content consumption, India is the world’s largest market. In India, there are more than 500 million active social media users.

How spirituality is impacting the usage is another interesting find. Devotional content has the highest repeat value across all platforms. A normal viral song will have a shorter shelf life in comparison to a devotional song like hanuman chalisa, as consumers will come back and listen to it again. For example, OMTV being the first sanatan story telling app has presence on short video apps like josh and chingari, within a few days we became verified accounts and now, we are crossing 200 million views on the information based spiritual content that we have created.

Let’s understand why spirituality is so popular. This genre never needs a proof concept, as whenever such content has come on any other platform it has always worked. It’s in our upbringing and DNA which makes us shift towards this kind of content. It was films like Sampoorna Ramayan, or Jai Santoshi Maa etc which worked on the big screen, and then the trend shifted to the TV set where Ramayan and Mahabharat became super successful.

Another reason why spiritual content works on social media is stress. We have been deprived of knowledge of sanatan culture for decades, and when a short format or content in this genre comes, we have this urge to know more about it. Since the music or content gives us some peace, we tend to listen to it again. Even if religious viewing is not our first choice, if we see something related to this genre we at least sample it. And if you like the info, you will subscribe and like the page as well.

Spirituality is huge on social media and it will remain one of the biggest and will have the highest viewership. Nobody hates this kind of content and if there are few likes but you will never see a dislike for these contents. Overall, social media is a good place for spiritual content and should be encouraged.

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