GENEVA: India’s digital engagement with WTO is on the rise as the country accounted for third largest number of visitors to the global trade body’s website in 2015.

Also, the country was on the top in the number of registrations for receiving email alerts about latest developments at the Geneva-based body.

“In 2015, total page views rose to 47.8 million, compared with 43.6 million the previous year. A total of 16 per cent of the visitors are from the US, followed by 6 per cent from Mexico, 5.75 per cent from India and 4.5 per cent from China,” the annual report of WTO said.

Over 2,000 web pages were created or updated during the course of the year.

The number of people registered to receive email alerts when news items are published on the website stands at just over 1,00,000.

“The countries with the largest number of registrations are India (10 per cent), the US (8 per cent), Mexico (5 per cent), China (4 per cent) and France (4 per cent),” it added.

The largest categories for these alerts are university students (30 per cent), the business community (13 per cent), government officials (12 per cent), the academic community (12 per cent) and lawyers (8 per cent).

The WTO expanded its use of social media, almost doubling its number of Twitter followers.

In 2015, the multi-lateral body expanded its use of social media to provide more regular updates about WTO activities and major events, it said adding an average of 3,56,000 video clips were watched on the website every month.

It said that the WTO’s Twitter followers had almost doubled to 2,45,000 by the end of 2015.

WTO tweets were viewed over 6 million times in 2015, the report said adding the WTO’s Facebook page was ‘liked’ by over 1,70,000 users, a 40 per cent increase from a year earlier.

The audience for the social media activities includes WTO delegates, students and academics.

The WTO is the only global international organisation dealing with the rules of trade between nations. As on 30 November 2015, 162 countries including India are members of this body.