There is little doubt that the 2014 elections while being determined by 800 million Indian voters also involve pitched battles on social media. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) have a clear lead in the social media stakes, the Congress has been apparently fighting back on this medium, new to 2014.
But with several million voices on Twitter on the elections alone how can someone figure out overall sentiment trends and what everybody is talking aboutIJ Twitter’s trending topics are one way of figuring out what is going on but doesn’t always give an accurate picture.
Indian IT powerhouse Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Saturday released an application, TCS iElect for Android devices that helps Twitter fans analyse the volume of tweets and what is the overall sentiment of the tweets about various top candidates.
A TCS spokesperson said that the company had developed this tool looking at the impact of the social media service on this election cycle. The app works by analysing hundreds of thousands of tweets using a well-established system of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ words to figure out the sentiment of the tweet. It keeps updating the tweets it analyses every 15-odd minutes.
The app is not as high-tech as some of the tools which various parties have been using to analyse social media. However, it does put fairly advanced social media analytics in the hands of the political junkie in India. The app also allows users to predict the results of the elections, build their own manifesto’s and share these with friends. The TCS iElect is currently available on the Google Play Store and is compatible with all Android devices running version 4.0 onwards. An iOS version for Apple devices is expected to be launched soon according to TCS.
You can download this app from http://goo.gl/Xwtme2