It's just a number game...

The numbers are bought through countless sites selling fans and followers.

Posts, tags, views, shares on popular social media platforms are fuelling the political debate in the country today. Not a single day goes by, when a  tweet from a politician has not become a trending topic, even controlling the day’s agenda, whether it is newspapers or TV debates.

The politicians jumped onto the bandwagon of Social Media in the last one year after the hype created by Narendra Modi’s (NaMo) social media campaign and the mainstream media highlighting it. Most of the politicians still have no clue on how to make the maximum use of power of Social Media except few likes of union minister Shashi Tharoor and former central minister Ajay Maken, who is now spearheading Congress response to Modi on social media platforms.

The only thing that most of the politicians understand is the number of likes that they have on their Facebook page or the number of followers on Twitter, etc. For them it's just a number game, but in reality its counter productive as most of the numbers that you see for politicians are the numbers that are bought through countless sites selling you fans and followers.

Modi footprints

Modi’s social media set-up was done in May 2009 when FB just started penetrating in India and he and his team had the vision to build it from that instance. The major spurt in NaMo social media has come in last 9-10 months.

Today, his social media footprints are omnipresent - be it Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr, Stumbleupon and also specially designed downloadable android, iphone & ipad application.

Modi’s social media strategy? Personalised & engaging tweets. He tweets in English & Hindi and in 12 other different languages, including Urdu; regular Facebook post updates; connecting on Google hangouts; and his very own YouTube channel with over 17 million views. Today, Modi is aiming for the highest office in one of the largest democracy. And he is leaving no stone unturned to connect to billion plus India, majority comprising of young population. More than half of 1.2 billion people are under the age of 25, and two-thirds are below 35. According to an estimate, 85 per cent of young India is connected through social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.

However, whether this click of mouse for ‘Like’ or ‘Retweet’ on Modi’s popular post or tweets will translate into crucial vote for him or the BJP during upcoming general elections is yet to be seen.

As one of the close associates of NaMo team of a deadly dozen digital political warriors quips, the next phase for NaMo is taking the ‘Likes’ to convert into votes through major interaction online. Other political leaders are still juggling with numbers, forget about the interactions. To support the claim, there is a clear comparison between the comments that each post or tweet receives and no other politician in India is even remotely close to Narendra Modi’s interaction level.

India’s large population and increasing tele-density, especially in urban pockets, has spurred an impressive jump in the number of people online. Moreover, a recent report released by the Internet and Mobile Association of India and IRIS Knowledge Foundation has revealed that of India’s 543 parliamentary constituencies, 160 can be termed as ‘high impact’ — that is, they will most likely be influenced by social media in the next general elections.

As the report explains, high impact constituencies are those where the numbers of Facebook users are more than the margin of victory of the winner in the last Lok Sabha election, or where Facebook users account for over 10 per cent of the voting population.

The study then goes on to declare 67 constituencies as medium-impact, 60 as low-impact and 256 as no-impact constituencies.

However, in a 21-nation survey conducted by the US based nonpartisan fact tank - Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project in 2012, “India ranked near the bottom in use of social networking sites, along with its neighbour, Pakistan. Just six per cent of respondents in India said they use social networking sites. An overwhelming 89 per cent said they do not use the internet at all. ”

(Akshay Sethia is CEO of Dezine Brainz, a digital marketing firm based in Gujarat and Kumar Manish is a social media enthusiast & co-initiator of Open Hours, a social initiative to bring diverse views on future of social media.)