Dr Chandra Mohan, state secretary, Uttar Pradesh BJP, says his party was the first to realise the power of social media and influencers for political campaigning. His views.
Not many years ago, door to door connection with the people, largescale political rallies and other such interactions were the only way to connect with the people and the voters. That has changed. Indians are now getting widely engaged on social media platform. With 516.92 million active uses in Instagram and 492.70 million users in Facebook, besides other, here is an opportunity to connect directly with the voters.
It was the BJP which first tapped and explored the vast opportunities (in social media) to reach out to the masses during the 2014 general elections. Social media played a vital role in the historic win of the party then and ever since PM Narendra Modi and the party machinery have been exploring and ‘exploiting’ new means of communication to remain connected with the polity.
We recognize the power of social media influencers and YouTubers who have significant audience reach.The party now has a dedicated team for the purpose and we keep organizing regular workshops to train our cadre in social media application and communication tools. This cadre act, in a way, as influencers to educate people about our patriotic ideology and vision.
This tribe of influencers, who belong to all age groups, have thousands and lakhs of followers on various platform like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc and they act as a silent workforce for us with one thing in common – dedication for the cause of Viksit Bharat, a developed and shining India.
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Besides, social media offers numerous ways like content posting, live interactions, direct messaging, etc to engage with the target audience. If you have to remain relevant, you will need to adopt it and regularly keep updated with emerging trends. For example, our party keeps using WhatsApp to send tailored messages to communicate with the people because more than 500 million people in India use WhatsApp as a mode of communication. And it requires little investment as the messaging app is free of cost.
While all other political groups, big or small, use social media platforms for interaction, the BJP can validly boast of boarding the train on time and that is why we are running ahead of others. Leave behind a district or the urban or the rural masses (that were considered to be the target audience or voters a couple of decades ago), we have our foot soldiers in every gali-mohalla (nook and corner).
Our chain of supporters stays in touch with the central command through social media and keeps getting regular updates about our policy initiatives. In addition, we have small groups on all social media platforms at the grassroots levels dedicated to disseminate and circulate any kind of information with the flash of an eye.
As told to Rajat Rai