With less than two months left for the 2014 general elections, we take a look at how our netas are faring at the virtual hustings. Their numbers in the social media may not translate into votes, but it definitely throws in a few interesting figures.

Criteria for selection: We picked three national leaders from three national parties with the strongest social media presence — the Bharatiya Janta Party, Indian National Congress and Aam Admi Party. That narrows down our list to three party leaders — Narendra Modi (BJP), Arvind Kejriwal (AAP) and Rahul Gandhi (INC). Modi and Kejriwal are active on most popular social media networks, while Rahul Gandhi does not have an official Twitter or Facebook account yet. We will accommodate the Congress leader in our next post, where we use a different set of parameters.

Parameters used: We picked Twitter over Facebook for this pre-election face-off. We dissect the numbers based on the following parameters:

Total number of followers

At the time of writing, Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal had 3,370,636 and 1,352,305 followers respectively. The numbers may increase or decrease depending on their fortunes.

Kejriwal joined twitter in November, 2011, a year before he launched AAP. He follows 71 users, he is listed by 2,654 users and has tweeted 2469 times.

Modi joined twitter in January, 2009, almost three years before Kejriwal. Modi follows 1,048 user, he is listed by 9,718 users, and has tweeted 3,891 times.

Daily increase in followers

Over the last three months — between November 11, 2013 and February 12, 2014 — Kejriwal accumulated 41,145 more followers than Modi. There was a sharp spike in followers after his party formed the government in New Delhi. Despite the recent bad press, Kejriwal is matching Modi in the daily increase in followers. Also, Kejriwal’s followers ratio,19,043.42, i.e followers per following is much higher than Modi’s 3,216.26.

Number of fake followers

In 2012, StatusPeople showed that Obama had six million fakes in his 19 million followers. This was a few months before the United States presidential election. We at The Indian Express used the same online application to calculate the number of fake followers that Kejriwal and Modi have. And the results were equally shocking. Kejriwal has a whopping 63% fake followers and Modi is a close second with 62%. And 33% of Kejriwal’s followers are inactive, which means they have not tweeted in the last 100 days. Also, 36% of Modi’s followers are inactive; 3% more than Kejriwal. We are not saying that these are acquired followers.

Twitter reach

According to tweetreach, Kejriwal has an estimated reach of 96,462 Twitter accounts, dwarfing Modi’s reach of 24,209 accounts. Based on these figures we can reach to the conclusion that Kejriwal has more impact over Modi, at least online if not in real life.

Tweets per day



Kejriwal tweets an average of 2.91 times a day since the day he had joined Twitter. Out of his 2,469 tweets, 48% are retweets. Modi, on the other hand, is clearly the busiest of the two leaders. His average is 4.1 tweets a day. A measly 5% of his 3,891 tweets are retweets.

Topics

The most discussed topics are pretty self-explanatory, they reflect the leaders agenda on and off-line.

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