Snap, the parent company of social media app Snapchat, on Thursday rolled out support for five additional Indian languages Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. These join the four Indian languages – Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and Punjabi – that are being supported since last year. With expanded support for vernacular, the company is hoping that it will attract more users in the country that is largely dominated by Instagram.
“We continue to roll out new features and experiences that reflect the culture and values of our community in India. We are excited by the growth we’ve seen here as we have almost doubled our daily users over the past year,” said Nana Murugesan, Managing Director, International Markets at Snap.
Snapchat, which has an average of 218 million daily users, is trying to build a local product for India.
The company opened its first office in Mumbai last year and established a team focused on expanding local partnerships, building an engaged community of creators and users and supporting local advertisers.
The company has so far announced partnerships with T-Series, NDTV, and WWM Times Group.
In addition, it launched Landmarkers Augmented Reality (AR) experiences for the Taj Mahal and the Gateway of India, as well as AR Lenses, Filters and Stickers during Indian festivals.
Snap recently teamed up with Reliance Jio for a first of its kind “Jio’s Got Talent” creative AR challenge.
“India is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world, and we want our platform to be accessible to as many people as possible,” said Murugesan.
The average number of Snaps created every day has grown to more than 3.5 billion while the average time spent per user is 30 minutes per day.
On average, 2 in 5 Snapchatters watch Discover feed content every day that offers more than 450 premium content channels worldwide.
Snapchat recently launched a unique form of personalised entertainment with Bitmoji TV, featuring the Snapchatter and last snapped friend in a 10-episode series.
