HYDERABAD: From Twitter chats, Facebook Lives to personal websites and YouTube channels, candidates from across political parties in the State are using various interactive methods to communicate with the people.
Be it TRS, Congress, BJP or TDP candidates, all of them are in the race in this poll season, focussing on image building. Assigning social media experts, each party has a set of people who will be monitoring the posts, tweets, likes and comments that will be posted on the groups and pages across platforms, including a specific set of do’s and don’t that team members have to follow. Groups of people are assigned to work on specific topics from looking into problem areas to creating content for the page as well as looking for ways to increase followers.
“One of the important works given to the team includes deleting hate messages posted on the pages from Opposition party members and followers and ensuring with the top-notch strategy keeps updating regularly. Not even common pleasantries like good morning or good night is exchanged as it looks like a time waste/waste of space on the page,” said one of the volunteers for INC Telangana twitter account.
While election surveys have been part of political parties strategies for long, social media and digital campaigning have seen a rising trend among parties. In fact, popularity of a party or leader is even gauged in terms of the following they have on Twitter and other platforms. With more than 2,88,000 Twitter followers and over 11 lakh Facebook followers, the TRS takes the lead followed by the State unit of Congress with over 2,26,000 Facebook likes and 43,147 Twitter followers.
BJP is in third position with 2,85,838 Facebook followers and over 33,700 Twitter followers while TDP has over 2,56,000 Twitter followers and 1,73,000 plus Facebook followers. Parties like CPI(M) and TJS have over one lakh followers on each of the two platforms.
According to political analysts, while political parties shell out crores of rupees for social media influencing, surveys and other services, individual leaders as well spend anywhere between `2 lakh and `10 lakh during election season, depending upon his/her constituency and election strategy.
Given that half the State’s population is below 25 years of age, there are a very few Lok Sabha candidates from across parties in the State who have not made their social media presence felt this poll season.
