There are almost 8+ months for the Assembly elections in Karnataka and each one is already geared up, especially the ASPIRANTS from all the parties. Their presence is seen at every festival when they decorate the beautiful city with ugly hoardings with their photos and host of leaders from their party. This is was very visible in the Shiva Jayanti festival where each aspirant was making some or the other move to be more noticed.
The use of social media in politics including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has dramatically changed the way campaigns are run and how citizens interact with their elected officials or even the aspirants.
Team AAB tried to find out how the Aspirants and elected leaders are doing on the Social Media.
Disclaimer: The list of Aspirants is just a representation and there could be so many more. We have enlisted the below with our limited knowledge.
The prevalence of social media in politics has made elected officials and candidates for public office more accountable and accessible to voters. And the ability to publish content and broadcast it to millions of people instantaneously allows campaigns to carefully manage their candidates’ images based on rich sets of analytics in real time and at almost no cost.
But, this is not the case with Belagavi, the social media presence is very less, even tough there has been significant increase in the recent months.
Political campaigns can tap into a wealth of information or analytics about the people who are following them on social media, and customize their messages based on selected demographics. In other words, a campaign may find one message appropriate for voters under 30 years old will not be as effective with over 60 years old.
The Brand building team behind these Leaders must realize a Page is what is needed on Facebook and a conversation between the leader and the citizens is what is expected. But we hardly found any reaction to the questions asked or issues raised by the Citizens.
Social media is medium of a two way conversation, then only it is Social media.
The data collected from Facebook pages was as on 7 August 2017, again some persons had pages and some personal profiles which makes it difficult to ascertain the exact followers.
Twitter is a complete failure for Belagavi, only one aspirant or leader we could trace on its platform. Youtube again was very similar fate.
Appreciate AAB’s Effort in gathering the info.
For me : “Every Coin has Two Faces”, and ‘Facebook Like’ is only one.
If there was something ‘Facebook Unlike’, then we would have somewhat known another one also.
I guess Anil Benake is from BJP?????