“Would a 25-year-old prefer to read about promises of employment generation or the increase in old-age pensions,” asks an IT cell member of a political party.
Targeted campaigning is the key in social media now, unlike in the early days when parties used to push out the same content for everyone. At the heart of it is the data analytics team, which studies voter behaviour based on data gathered from door-to-door surveys or through mobile applications.
“The more you know of each voter personally, the more you can communicate to them effectively. This is where data analytics is important. Even if you don’t get such data on each voter, it is enough to get it for different segments, like first-time voters or women, and develop campaign messaging to target them. With Kerala having the highest smartphone penetration in India, digital campaigning is bound to create a bigger impact here,” says Anil K. Antony, convener of the State Congress digital media cell, who was part of the Congress’s IT cell operations for the Gujarat and Rajasthan Assembly elections.
Platforms abound
The ‘war rooms’ of the various parties resemble online news platforms with teams for research, content creation, production, and broadcasting. WhatsApp and Facebook continue to be the major platforms for online campaigning. While Twitter remained largely untapped, the parties have begun to reach out to the seemingly ‘apolitical’ youth by creating content for Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Instead of contracting the work out to agencies, the parties are now focussing on building a permanent in-house team, to cut costs. “Unlike other parties, we have had a social media team comprising only party workers from the initial days itself. Our focus is on delivering apt content to each WhatsApp group up to the booth level, with a target of hundreds of people in each booth. We have a fact-checking team to ensure that the content is factual and follows our political line,” says a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s IT cell.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had sowed the seeds of its digital outreach strategy as early as 2010, hopes to reap the benefits of its full-fledged IT network. Right from its national cell down to constituency-level units, the BJP IT Vibhag has focussed on projecting the party’s policies through social media platforms. Besides, the Narendra Modi (NaMo) mobile application has been primed as a major campaign tool.
Vibhag State convener Krishna Kumar says several volunteers have been assigned responsibilities to target social media users of various age groups and backgrounds. While the party has verified accounts in social networking platforms, it also feeds content to over 25,000 WhatsApp groups.
No longer apolitical
With the elections nearing, many apolitical WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages have metamorphosed into platforms for political propaganda. Analysts feel most parties have been cultivating such platforms for some time with an eye on reaping political gains.
Though the Election Commission declared that internet platforms would come under the ambit of the model code of conduct, its enforcement remains a grey area. While paid content has to be screened, most parties prefer other means for campaign. Monitoring the source of unsolicited mass propaganda messages remains a daunting task for enforcement agencies.
