Smriti Irani, the Woman, and Child Development Minister, recently won the political battle in the Lok Sabah elections, for the Amethi parliamentary seat with a margin of 55120 votes. Almost all political leaders, including our Prime Minister, have used the social media platforms to generate the digital wave again in the hearts of the people in the country.
The Star of Social Media
Smriti Irani holds the fourth position in terms of followers, among all the other leaders and ministers. According to Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Associate Professor at IIIT Delhi and IIIT Hyderabad, Smriti Irani appears in the top-10 list of all social networks in terms of likes and followers. She has a following base of over 9.3 million on Twitter, 5.6 million on Facebook and 4.4 Lakhs on Instagram. This explains the position Smriti Irani holds on social media.
According to the experts, Smriti Irani’s social image has played a humongous role in making her win the parliamentary seat of Amethi against Rahul Gandhi.
Some Statistics
According to the professionals at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, more than 12 percent of Irani’s feed on Twitter, was put out in 2019 alone to get on to the election wave on the social media. This figure amounted to 3600 tweets, which were done from January 1st of this year.
1895 of those 3600 posts, contained media content- 506 original tweets, 1358 retweets and 31 quotes.
Out of the 3600 posts, 1000 were original, 2535 were retweets (including replies), and 77 were quotes.
The Unbelievable Victory: Amethi
Among those 3600 tweets, 275 tweets mentioned Amethi in them. On the other hand, the former governing Congress party had Rahul Gandhi mention about the key constituency only 3 times. Reporters say that she set up a special team in Amethi for sending out media contents on WhatsApp groups and Facebook, specially designed around the constituency.
They also used various temporary Twitter handles to send out text messages to not just the people of Amethi but across the country, and created a buzz on Twitter.
The attention of the Gen Z population
The wave for the digital election originally generated in 2014, was fought on mobile phones when the people were beginning to get a hang of how the political battle was being fought on social media as well.
This time, the Gen Z population, which also happen to be the first time voters, were in the demand of informative content. Smriti Irani backed the opportunity and presented posts backed up with information, which made her a good communicator on social media. Through this, she managed to grab the attention of 12 to 15 million Gen Z population.
Also Read: NaMo 2.0: Digital Strategies That Made PM Modi Win Yet Again
The #Hashtag Trend
#AmethiWithSmriti #SackSmritiIrani #SmritiForAmethi #AmethiWithSmritiDidi #SmritiVsRahul #SmritiOnRepublic #SmritiSeDartaHai2SeatSeLadtaHai #SmritiIrani #FranklySpeakingWithSmriti #SmritiSpooksRahul #SmritiDegreeDangal.
These were few of the numerous #Hasgtags that trended the most during elections.
