Narendra Modi may well be the Prime Minister of India by this time next week, but one battle he clearly lost was that for most mentions in a day on social media site Twitter from India. Amazing as it might sound, according to data released by Twitter in the period starting January 1, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi had a massive 99,569 mentions on January 27. Unfortunately for Gandhi who has likely led the Congress into their worst-ever electoral performance, January 27 was the day he gave an interview to Times Now, an interview that has been universally considered disastrous.
In fact, despite Narendra Modi’s perceived popularity on Twitter, he is far behind not only Gandhi but also Arvind Kejriwal according to this data. Modi topped out at 43,805 mentions from India on May 8, while Kejriwal’s best day was 74,433 mentions on March 7. That said, the same data which is only for Tweets from India clearly identifies that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the mentions battles among political parties. However, there is little doubt that the upstart Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) ran an extremely successful social media campaign both on Twitter as well as Facebook.
However, there is little doubt that Narendra Modi is by far and away one of the most popular personalities on Twitter and at last count had close to four million followers on the site, compared to the BJP’s official twitter handle (@BJP4India) 500,000. Including tweets from all over the world, of which according to Twitter data there were 56 million, Narendra Modi was mentioned in 20 per cent of them. These 56 million tweets had a reach of 267 billion.
However, Twitter India did not give ‘sentiment’ analysis of the tweets, however using the TCS iElect application which analyses the ‘sentiment’ of tweets based on the language used in tweets, certain trends are clear. For example, Modi is a polarising figure on Twitter, his positive and negative tweet counts remaining neck and neck but according to this application which analyses a week worth of tweets Modi almost constantly had over half the traffic volume. These online stats reflect the overall sentiment of the election that pivoted on one man.
Social Media has proven to be a game-changer in these elections and Indian elections may never be the same again. No matter who might be the victor on May 16, Twitter has been the big winner in these elections. Raheel Khursheed, Heads, News, Politics and Government, Twitter India told The Pioneer, “This lok Sabha election has consolidated Twitter’s position as the go to platform for political conversations in India. For example,the volume of political conversation on the platform has increased by 600 per cent and mentions of leaders and political parties ten times since the start of the year. Take any metric; reach, original content generated, engagement by political leaders, user engagement, news breaks, influence on political discourse or capacity to set media agenda, Twitter has won the Indian election.”
Khursheed added: “From a Twitter point of view, it has been satisfying to watch leaders, parties, and news organisations innovate on the platform and use Twitter as the center of the political conversation. It has been incredible to see the variety of content produced and consumed and the impact Twitter has had on the political discourse. Keep in mind in 2009, there was one politician with 6,000 followers on Twitter to now, when every party and candidate is represented. Being on Twitter this election has been like having a front row seat to all the action.”
(Tomorrow: How the BJP won the online war)