Results 2014: How Twitter Influenced Indian Politics
The landslide win by BJP led Narendra Modi is a turning point in Indian political history and social media tools seems to have their share as we can note by the extensive of tools like Twitter by Indian politicians. Here we look at the tweets mentioned on the elections and it was an astounding 58 million tweets since the start of the year with Narendra Modi getting mentioned 11.85 million times since 1st Jan, 2014.
"This is truly the first Twitter Election in India, with all major political parties and candidates actively campaigning & connecting with voters on Twitter. " said Rishi Jaitly, India Market Director, Twitter.
On the counting day it-self i.e. 16th May twitter reported election related tweets of 2.003 Million with Modi seeing 0.75 Million tweets. The table below shows the top five election related tweets as of 16th May.
The Map of India below shows the level of activity regarding the political parties and their candidates, Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Narendra Modi, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal.
In fact Narendra Modi added the highest number of followers in a single day. He started the day at 39,86,878 followers and ended it at 40,91,739 and now 4.11 million.
Incidentally, his tweet "India has won" is the most retweeted ever in India.
