Twitter has released data charts that represent the most talked about political party and leader during the elections over Twitter. The service has traced the number of times each party or leader’s name was mentioned between January 1 to May 12 to create this infograph.
Statistics shared by Twitter India show that users posted 56 million election-related tweets from January 1 this year until 5 p.m. on May 12.
It must be noted that the graph represents the number of tweets and does not consider sentiment analysis (positive tweets against negative), and hence, doesn’t indicate which political party or leader is more popular. For instance, Rahul Gandhi was tweeted about most when his interview with Arnab Goswami with was aired, and we doubt it was all positive.
How political parties fared:
BJP: The party was mentioned over 30,000 times in a day on an average. The highest number of mentions it got was 88,924, when it released its manifesto.
The three days when the number of BJP mentions shot up were:
– March 23: Arvind Kejriwal visited Varanasi to contest against Narendra Modi in the same constituency
– April 7: BJP released its manifesto
– Match 6: Kejriwal was detained in Gujarat and Aam Admi Party held protests outside BJP’s headquarters in New Delhi.
Indian National Congress: Congress was mentioned 15,000 to 20,000 times on an average each day. On 7 March, Congerss was tweeted about 49,369 times on the day it released its manifesto. The only other day when the mentions rose over 35,000 was on the day Exit Poll results were announced on television.
AAP: This party had an average mention of 30,000 to 35,000 times per day. The two days people tweeted most about AAP were:
– January 21: Kejriwal called off a dharna to suspend some policemen.
– March 6: Kejriwal apologized for the behaviour of AAP party workers in Delhi and Lucknow while protesting his detention.
Most Tweeted politicians
Among the three prominent politicians, Rahul Gandhi was the most talked about on a single day and his name was mentioned 99,569 times on January 27, when he was interviewed on Times Now. Kejriwal was mentioned 74,433 times on March 7 post his detention protests. Modi-mentions, on the other hand, was more even without spikes. His mentions surged to 43,805 on the day his interview with Arnab Goswami was aired on 8 May.
What’s prominent: party or people
Everybody seems to have an opinion about BJP and AAP, but people do not passionately like or dislike the Congress enough to talk about it on Twitter.
Though BJP is the only party to have announced a Prime Ministerial candidate, tweets about BJP focus more on the party. Tweets about Congress and AAP meanwhile, focus more on the candidates and less on the party.
Also read: What Indian Digital Media companies are doing for #Election2014
News Laundry released an interesting interface that analyses prominent journalists’ slant towards political parties and leaders.
