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The next wave of growth for messaging platforms will come from tier-2 and tier-3 cities, led by local language content, Indian messaging platform Hike Messenger said in a statement.
"These days more and more people are shifting to messengers which are becoming a new platform for day to day conversation. Messengers are the most used applications and almost 34 percent Indians spend time chatting on messengers," Hike said.
Google estimates 30 percent of users in India to be living in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, the company pointed out.
"Looking at the stats, there is a huge chunk of the population who are essentially untapped, given linguistic barriers," it said in the statement.
For internet inclusion to spread, companies need to understand their audiences and personalise their marketing strategies accordingly, Hike said.
It added that they must use regional languages to go deeper into these cities and their surrounding regions to tap a wider audience.
The company has come up with expressive localised stickers and has a library of close to 20,000 stickers in over 40 local languages. Hike claimed that these hyperlocal stickers are exchanged over 300 million times a day.
To further localise the experience, the messaging platform has stickers that reflect both national and regional culture in languages like Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi, etc.
Hike even has a library of customised stickers for over 500 colleges across India.
The company's target is to bring a billion people online, and it said that would only be possible when its users are able to communicate in their respective languages.
The messaging platform has also launched Hike News, which supports English, Hindi and seven other regional languages such as Marathi, Gujarati, and Tamil, among others.
Along with news, the company has introduced a feature that allows text typed in any language to be converted into a sticker by the user.
Hike Messenger was founded in 2012 by Kavin Bharti Mittal. It was started as a messaging app for the youth, with 80 percent of its users being less than 25 years old.
The messaging app has acquired a user base of 100 million over the last five years. It was last funded in April 2016 by investors like Tencent and Foxconn Electronics, raising USD 175 million.
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