Among political parties in Tamil Nadu, the AIADMK is the most popular among the technology savvy crowd if the number of visitors to its recently launched official web site and average time spent by them on the page are anything to go by.
In fact, the AIADMK’s online membership enrolment drive, the first of its kind by a political party in Tamil Nadu, witnessed over 40,000 registrations within six weeks after the party launched an exclusive IT wing in February last.
A plethora of web-based initiatives were introduced, giving the party’s digital campaign a leg up. With more and more young voters logging on to its website — whose position was 18,751 on the Alexa ranking among Indian websites on April 3 — the party was on top of the popularity list in Tamil Nadu. According to the global web analytics company, the average daily page views per visitor was 5.2 and the average time spent was 6.23 minutes.
In contrast, the DMK’s official site was ranked around 40,892 with its daily page views per visitor standing at 2 and the time spent at 1.5 minutes. The ranking of other parties by Alexa was still down the list of popularity with MDMK at 95,521 and DMDK at 167,722.
Besides the web site, the IT wing of AIADMK has also started campaigning through the popular WhatsApp messaging route. About 10 lakh mobile phone users receive messages with audio or video clippings, stickers and banners, highlighting the welfare schemes and manifesto of the party on WhatsApp from the number 9087778890 daily.
To keep the cadre connected with the party general secretary, J Jayalalithaa, another digital initiative has been launched, in which anyone calling up the number 9543778899 can listen to the voice of the leader. The messages are refreshed, which enables cadre who could not make it to the campaign meetings to keep themselves updated on the speeches.
Even on Twitter, Jayalalithaa is ahead of her rivals in Tamil Nadu as her name gets tweeted more number of times than others, if one were to go by the Topsy scorecard.