BENGALURU: The just-concluded state elections may have marked the start of a revolution—in the business of forecasting vote outcomes. Predicting and influencing election results could be moving even beyond the realm of global social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Regional language app Share-Chat, where users share stickers and jokes, said it was able to gauge which way the wind was blowing in Uttar Pradesh as early as February 16 by analysing what its users were sharing in the state. The findings were pretty much in line with the results on March 11, the company said.While many traditional pollsters didn’t exactly hit the mark, startups like polling platform MyVoteToday and electoral analysis platform 5Forty3 used opinions tracked via social media and independent polls to determine voting patterns using data science to predict outcomes.“The UP election was a hot topic that was being discussed among our users, so we decided to track the campaign by creating a bucket with tags, for instance one with BJP responding to different parties and then one for normal UP elections,” said Shashank Shekhar, senior manager, partnerships, at ShareChat.“We could figure out the leadership position of parties and their popularity in terms of shares, likes, views and comments that were analysed. On an average, one user has posted at least two to three posts on politics.”Shekhar, along with data science team members Ankit Bansal and Aman Kumar, analysed the data for UP and Punjab.From January 20 to February 19, ShareChat saw about 15,200 political posts on ShareChat that were shared on Whatsapp over 321,000 times. These posts were created by 6,000 unique users, according to Shekhar, translating to 2.54 posts per user on average for four parties—the Bharatiya Janata Party Samajwadi Party , Bahujan Samaj Party and Congress.According to the data tracked by SAIF Partners-backed ShareChat, the total views on posts referring to the BJP were over 5 million, with SP coming in second with a little over 1.5 million views and Congress last with 1.3 million views.Similarly, in terms of positive and negative posts created for parties, there were over 6,000 positive posts created in favour of BJP, with BSP coming in second with around 3,000 positive posts, SP third with 2,550 positive posts and Congress with less than 1,000 posts in its favour.In terms of leaders mentioned positively and negatively in viral posts, Modi had 45 positive and 10 negative mentions, followed by 17 negative and three positive mentions for the Akhilesh Yadav-Rahul Gandhi duo and eight positive mentions and one negative mention for BSP’s Mayawati . The data collected and analysed prior to the elections was representative of sentiment toward political parties and was first published in a Medium post on February 21.In Punjab, many of ShareChat’s users had a higher number of likes for posts associated with Congress at around 15,000, Akali Dal and BJP alliance-oriented posts were around 10,000, followed by AAP posts, which were around 7,500. However, many of ShareChat’s users, mostly youth, appeared to strongly favour AAP. In terms of positive and negative posts, over 90% of the posts related to Akali-BJP Dal were negative, for Congress it was 60% positive and 40% negative, followed by AAP where 90% of posts were positive. Most positive mentions among leaders in Punjab were for Amarinder Singh, who is on track to become chief minister of the state.ShareChat, which has 1.3 million weekly active users nationally, has approximately 89,714 in UP and 69,264 in Punjab.MyVoteToday and 5Forty3 were also able to predict the BJP wave in the elections, they said. Bengaluru-based startup MyVoteToday used a sample size of 270,000 people in UP, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Goa. “Around 41% of the users that responded through our polls were from towns with less than 3 lakh population.Barring Goa, which everyone got wrong, it was easier to predict the other states,” said Amit Bagaria, co-founder of MyVoteToday. “If through this kind of data we can predict the elections, in the future this can help with analysing deeper socio-economic issues prevalent in different parts of India.”Launched in 2016, electoral analysis startup 5Forty3 used a sample size of 6,150 in Uttar Pradesh and 3,426 in Punjab. According to founder Praveen Patil, sooner or later every politician and political party will realise that the support of data companies is vital for winning elections.“We have already received over a dozen requests for proposals (RFP’s) from various contesting candidates in Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat which go to the polls in the next one year,” said Patil.However, pre-election polling might not be very useful, said an analyst working with the Prime Minister’s Office, who didn’t want to be named. “Plain numbers in pre-election polling doesn’t help that much, but issue-related mood gauging does frequently help in deciding what issues to concentrate upon, especially when the sample size is above 20,000,” said the analyst.Several experts said the bigger picture, beyond predicting election results prior to their announcement lies in focusing upon social or economic issues that can be identified quickly and rectified in the long run.“For any platform to state such accurate views, it is necessary for the common man to voice their opinion without any bias or influence from political parties,” said Mayank Khanduja of SAIF Partners. “Through such a platform, one can understand the on-ground trends among the common man, identify their issues and address their concerns faster.”