Elaborated SWOT Analysis of ShareChat – An Indian Social Media Application

Quick Stats on ShareChat

Founder	Ankush Sachdeva
Year Founded	2015
Origin	Bangalore, India
No. of Employees	1800+
Company Type	Private
Market Cap	N/A
Annual Revenue	Rs 38.12 Crore (2020)
Net Income/ Profit	N/A

Products of ShareChat

• Social media
• Image sharing
• Video sharing
• Instant messaging
• Chatroom

Competitors of ShareChat

ShareChat compete on a global level with many other top social media apps. The top 4 competitors of ShareChat are

• VerSe Innovation
• Zebra Labs
• Illumy
• Meta

Now that we understand the company’s core business, let’s delve into the SWOT analysis of ShareChat.

SWOT Analysis of ShareChat

SWOT analysis of ShareChat will determine the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and hence it is of immense importance for any company to work. It is a tried and true management paradigm that allows companies to compare their business and performance to competitors and the industry as a whole.

Let’s first start by analyzing the strength of ShareChat from the SWOT analysis of ShareChat.

Strengths of ShareChat

• Great Fundings: ShareChat continuously raises funds from big corporations recently in 2020 ShareChat raised $40 million from investors Dr Pawan Munjal of Hero MotoCorp, Ajay Shridhar Shriram of DCM Shriram, Twitter, SAIF Partners, Lightspeed Ventures and India Quotient. By 2022 the company is soon going to reach a valuation of US$5.
• Acquisitions: Mohalla Technologies is famous for several acquisitions including the company acquiring Transversal Tech-owned short video sharing platform, Clip. In February, March & August 2020 it acquired Memer, Circle Internet and also bought MX TakaTak from Times Internet Group. With an increasing number of acquisitions, ShareChat is becoming stronger day by day.
• App Moj: The app like TikTok has emerged as India’s number one short video app with over 160 million monthly active users. The app has beaten others like MX TakaTak, Josh and Roposo and positioned itself as the #1 short video platform in India. 
• Strong User Base: Over 32 million users are on ShareChat with a growth rate of 36% per year and this data is expected to double in the upcoming years.
• Initiatives Against Misinformation: In 2019, due to the higher spreading of fake news, hate speech, spam and coordinated misinformation campaign, ShareChat took down around half a million pieces of content and removed 54,000 accounts. This represents that ShareChat has strict norms of content flow on its platform and it always tries to create a community of good content sharers. 

Weaknesses of ShareChat

• Limited Audience: ShareChat has a limited number of users who belong to Indian rural communities and the content often on the platform is not good. The same goes with their application Moj where bad quality content is floating on the platform and there is no control over it.
• Diversifying: ShareChat made attempts to diversify itself in several areas which ultimately proved to be unsuccessful and made the company lose a lot of money. 
• Increasing User Complaints: ShareChat received 5.6 Mn user complaints in Feb 2022 for taking down user content due to increasing abusive language content which formed 27.59% of the total complaints.

Opportunities for ShareChat

• Increase Usage of Smartphones: Smartphones are simple and easy to use in tandem with ShareChat since it helps the user to quickly take pictures and share them easily.
• Improved Scalability: As the technology has advanced the usage of smartphones and other technologies has eventually increased, and as a result apps have started becoming more common and borders non-existent.
• Growing Demand for Privacy: Any Social Media app cannot be a success until and unless it provides great security to its users. And ShareChat has proved to be a loyal social media partner as everything is under the surveillance of the user. ShareChat ensures greater privacy for its users.
• New Users: ShareChat should start creating a platform where it can tap people from urban areas and it can also improve the content on the platform which presently is getting worse day by day. With new and more urban users there are increasing chances of the flow of more knowledgeable and wise content.
• New Features: Over time ShareChat has come up with various new features which have turned out to be attractive for many users. Continuing to introduce new features can be a magical turning point for the company.
• Customer Engagement: With more people coming on ShareChat it will lead to the growth of the company and can turn out as the biggest opportunity for ShareChat.

Threats to ShareChat

• Competition: As ShareChat is emerging into the field of social media it has threats from both experienced and new competitors, some of them namely Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, Tango and Talk free.
• Technological Advancements: Technology is evolving and so ShareChat has to, with the introduction of new features like instant messaging and messages remaining for a very short duration of time hence technology related to instant messaging is having something new every single time and managing this can be a huge challenge.
• Restrictions: ShareChat has faced several legal challenges since 2011 and so many countries have banned the app which is ultimately affecting the accountability of ShareChat among users.
• Negative Feedback: A lot of users have raised their voices over the vulgar content shared through ShareChat which even includes cyberbullying and harassment. These threats should be solved so that it doesn’t become fatal.
• Customer Behaviour: With changing time customers’ mindsets change too. What is new today may lose its glamour tomorrow and this is very true in cyberspace. Customers change their priorities and mindset within the glimpse of an eye and move to something else. So ShareChat should work smartly in a way so that its users don’t lose interest in it.

This ends our elaborated SWOT analysis of ShareChat. Let us conclude our learning below.