Social media chatter spikes on counting day

Election activity trended on social networking websites, with many users voicing their opinions and sharing the latest results

The elections of 2014 were fought with a lot of intensity on the social media too. In fact, the polls were touted as the country’s first social media elections. On counting day, especially, the social networking sites were agog with activity, with users voicing their opinions and updating results, minutes after news would break on television and also newspaper websites.

With Friday being a working day, office-goers had to depend on social media websites to share information about the winners and losers.

“For most part of the day, I have been following Twitter for election news from my office. My colleagues and friends were also sharing news and pictures on the internet,” said Saurabh Chatterjee, an IT employee at Gachibowli.

Election results trended on Facebook, Twitter and Google Hangout all through Friday, and so did the huge victory for the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. In fact, ‘#Results2014’, ‘#PMNaMo’ and ‘#Elections2014’ were some of the top trending hash tags on Twitter. The slogan

Ab Ki Baaar, Modi Sarkaar also was tweeted and put up on the ‘timelines’ by a large number of Facebook users.

The special news coverage by The Hindu on Twitter, on the handle ‘#THresults’, was trending on the social media websites. The HinduHyderabad ’s Twitter account ‘@HydConnect’ and ‘#THresults’ witnessed a lot of traffic from social media users looking for instant breaking news.

Search giant Google, which had also featured a special doodle – that of election ink painted on the index finger – on its homepage, had put up live results as the votes were being counted.