Influencer Marketing Blog

The Social Strategy Powering one of the World’s Biggest Retailers (HBBIP #153)

Written by Alex Rawitz | Sep 21, 2026, 3:00:01 PM

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This week’s spotlight brand highlights several emerging trends in the creator economy at large, while also revealing dynamics in a huge market that I don’t speak about as often as I should. You could say that I’m pretty excited about it.

So log on and lock in, because we’re about to dive right into the wonderful world of…

The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): Flipkart

In 2007, two guys in Bangalore founded a business in their apartment. Well, probably more than just two guys did that in 2007, but these two particular guys were former Amazon employees. They remembered how Jeff Bezos got started, and built a bookselling business. So far so good.

Then, unlike most people who quite literally try this at home, they built an Amazon.

The fruit of their labor was Flipkart, a name that might not mean a ton to you if you’re not an Indian consumer with internet access. But if you are, hoo boy, you see this name everywhere.

While it’s not exactly germane to many of the excellent people who receive this newsletter, a close look at Flipkart’s social media growth, and the composition of its digital community, reveals some pretty telling and relevant trends for the industry as a whole. In other words, I learned a lot doing this research, and I think you’ll learn a lot reading it.

On that note, question one:

 

How Is Flipkart Performing on Social Media?




Flipkart Creator Count, 2020 - 2025

Flipkart expanded its community from 637 creators in 2020 to 12.8k creators in 2025, a casual 20.1x increase over six years. The brand’s creator count growth was steady, but still impressive, between 2020 and 2023, then entered a period of explosive expansion, tripling in 2024 and nearly tripling again in 2025.

As you might expect, this population boom set up Flipkart for even more dramatic growth across other metrics, including…



Flipkart Post Count, 2020 - 2025

All those additional creators weren’t just twiddling their thumbs: Flipkart’s content volume swelled from 3.5k posts in 2020 to 101.8k posts in 2025, a remarkable 29.4x increase. As with its good friend creator count, post count gradually through 2023 before accelerating dramatically over the last two years: roughly tripling in 2024, then increasing fivefold in 2025.

Flipkart EMV, 2020 - 2025

When it came to Earned Media Value (EMV), a metric that gauges the virality and impact of individual content in social media conversations, Flipkart saw its total rise from $22.9M EMV in 2020 to $590.5M EMV in 2025, a 25.7x increase that proved in-line with the brand’s other progress. And stop me if you’ve heard this one before: growth was pretty steady, then kicked up a notch in 2024, and then a few more notches in 2025.




                                                                                                   Flipkart Impressions, 2020 - 2025

We’re going to need a new scale to measure this one, folks. Flipkart’s impressions shot up from 396.7M in 2020 to 14.9B impressions in 2025, a 37.5x increase that registered as the brand’s strongest improvement in any major metric. Once again we’re looking at threefold growth in 2024 and fivefold growth in 2025. Who knows what we can expect in 2026?



Flipkart Engagements, 2020 - 2025

Engagements, as per usual, lagged a little behind other metrics, demonstrating that for all the increased content, and all the eyes on that increased content, getting creators to interact with that content is another challenge altogether. In this case, Flipkart’s engagements increased from 12.7M in 2020 to 171.1M in 2025, a ho-hum 13.4x surge.

What can account for growth this crazy? In other words…

What's Flipkart's Channel Breakdown?

Flipkart's Share of Impressions by Platform, September 2025 - August 2026

It’s been a while since we’ve had YouTube lead one of these breakdowns, but here we are. YouTube is clearly Flipkart's dominant awareness platform, generating roughly two-thirds of all the brand’s impressions. Instagram contributes almost all of what remains while Facebook accounts for only a fraction of total impressions.

The most interesting thing, at least to me, is that TikTok is on this chart, believe it or not. But the channel’s total is so small that it just straight-up fails to register. Who says you can’t do it big without TikTok in this day and age?



Flipkart's Share of Engagements by Platform, September 2025 - August 2026

Things are a little more evenly distributed here, with YouTube and Instagram running a little closer together, and Facebook cutting itself a slightly thicker sliver of pie. Once again, TikTok registers so negligibly as to not appear at all.

No TikTok?!?! What will I do with myself? How will I even begin to explain…

Who Are Flipkart's Creators?

1. Flipkart's Creator Community Is Structurally Distinct

As one of the largest brands in the Indian digital commerce space, Flipkart’s architecture reflects the specific dynamics of the Indian internet: on a leaderboard of Flipkart’s top 1k posts by EMV from September 2025 to August 2026, YouTube dominated with more than 70% of the overall EMV, while Instagram contributed 24%. TikTok was absent, consistent with India’s continued TikTok ban.

Beyond this channel-level distinction, the tippy-top of Flipkart’s creator community is notably concentrated. No. 1 overall EMV-driver facttechz ($36M EMV), a Hindi-language YouTube Shorts channel covering viral facts, consumer rights, and social issues, is an order of magnitude larger than most other individual contributors. Generally, Flipkart is appearing as a hashtag or contextual link within facttechz’s content, rather than as its primary subject. Meanwhile, No. 2 creator GV GAMING ($27.7M EMV) posts Hindi-language comedy Shorts, or entertainment content where Flipkart appears as a product source in the description or tag. Other top EMV-drivers like Harish Burnwal ($25.5M EMV) and Sajan Ahir Shorts ($24.9M EMV) follow the same pattern. Thus, a significant portion of Flipkart's enormous performance metrics totals are driven by ambient brand mentions across India's short-form entertainment ecosystem, rather than intentional brand activations.

 

2. Sales Are Flipkart's Time to Shine

The strongest recurring content generator in Flipkart's data is the brand’s seasonal sale event ecosystem: the Big Bang Diwali Sale, the Flipkart GOAT Sale, and related promotional events drive coordinated creator activation across the community's most diverse range of creator types. Metrics among Flipkart’s top creators are directly traceable to sale-period content. For example, sachinacademy17 ($15.8M EMV) is an exam preparation channel whose growth reflected sale season integration with deals on study material. Meanwhile, Pranjal Rajput ($13.9M EMV) posted specific #FlipkartFashion Shorts emphasizing discounted items, while reshhvlogs ($8.1M EMV) shared festive seasonal haul content.

Sales activations touched every major content category simultaneously, helping to make Flipkart so omnipresent. Arun Prabhudesai ($4.7M EMV), a tech reviewer, shared content captioned "Stop Buying Phones Offline! ft. Flipkart GOAT Sale #shorts,” while Jooki Fashion ($3.3M EMV) unboxed various home furniture items and SalmaStyles ($3.5M EMV) tried out kurta sets and wedding dress hauls achieved with the brand. Even KaMad Best Deals ($3.9M EMV) reported on construction materials, particularly TMT steel rods, that were available on Flipkart, illustrating the brand’s breadth.

Bringing all this sales content together were the hashtags #SlayitWithFlipkart and #FitcheckwithFlipkart, which creators like Pranjal Rajput, SalmaStyles, sriambikaji09, and others used in their top posts, indicating a coordinated fashion campaign brief throughout sales season.

3. Four Distinct Creator Niches Define Flipkart's Organic Community

When you (by which I mean ‘I’) look at the breadth of Flipkart's organic creator community, five content categories emerge as meaningful EMV contributors, underscoring the unique social media dynamics that a non-Western brand brings to the table.

First up are fashion and lifestyle creators, most of whom post Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts built around Flipkart fashion hauls, kurta sets, festive wear, and budget styling. We also get plenty of extremely hunger-inducing Bengali-language cooking and lifestyle content that embed direct Flipkart product links for sarees, cookware, and appliances mid-narrative.

The edutainment, facts, and coaching cluster is the second major category, offering everything from viral facts channels (like No. 1 EMV-driver facttechz) through government exam preparation to virtual education channels. Flipkart appears in this cluster primarily through embedded product links, study material listings, or as a contextual platform tag. Generally, Flipkart isn’t the main focus in this content.

Third, we have a bit of an outlier religious and devotional content cluster. This category features everything from Islamic devotional and Hajj/Umrah pilgrimage accounts to accounts that post Hindu devotional content accompanied by Flipkart bedsheet and kurta recommendations. I don’t think I’ve ever reported on e-commerce theology before, but I find this blend of the sacred and the profane genuinely fascinating. After all, people need to buy religious items too, and just because a deal is too good to be true doesn’t mean it’s sinful.

Finally, we have a whole cluster of accounts posting AI-generated content. A cohort of accounts created in the same general period—ai.doctor_sahab ($7.2M EMV), ai.gharelu_tips ($6.4M EMV), ai.gharelu_upchar ($2.4M EMV), ai.health_jankari ($3M EMV), dr.wellness_ai ($2.5M EMV)—all follow an identical naming pattern and post similar AI-generated health and home remedy content. While these accounts don’t represent genuine creator relationships, they underscore the dynamics of the current social media ecosystem, and the challenges that brands face as they navigate toward the creator economy’s future.

 

*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.

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