As the countdown to the general elections 2014 begins, social media conversations around possible candidates for the top positions have gathered momentum and are likely to reach a crescendo as we get closer.
Blogworks has launched the first edition of its monthly India’s Most Mentioned Political Leaders index, analysing the Top 20 Most Mentioned Political Leaders online for the period January 2013 – April 2013.
The report gives key findings across six categories. Here are some highlights:
- Overall Buzz: Narendra Modi, popularly called NaMo, leads with more than thrice as many mentions as the nearest contender, Rahul Gandhi. New entrant to politics, Arvind Kejriwal, is at the 5th position on total mentions.
- Buzz over Time Period: Both Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi saw the largest volume of mentions in April 2013, but Narendra Modi has taken a dominant lead with just his April mentions exceeding the total mentions of Rahul Gandhi in the entire duration of Jan-April 2013.
- Age Break-up: Narendra Modi (63%) is marginally behind Rahul Gandhi (67%) in terms of mentions by the youth between the age-group of 18 – 34. It is noteworthy that the bulk of Arvind Kejriwal, Sushma Swaraj and Nitish Kumar’s mentions are from a relatively older age-group of users between 45 – 54 years of age.
- Gender break-up: In terms of gender, Narendra Modi has the highest mentions from women (30%) followed by Sushma Swaraj (24%).
- Top Themes:
- In the sample, Caste and Religion has been found to be the most talked-about subject around Narendra Modi, with the Godhra Riots and Akbaruddin Owaisi’s arrest driving most negative mentions for him, clearly implying the masses haven’t forgotten these issues.
- Conversations and mentions around Law and Internal Affairs were most talked about by and around Rahul Gandhi. He also received the maximum negative mentions around the theme of Corruption. Interestingly, he has also received a high number of negative mentions for being portrayed as a Youth icon.
- Development and Economy drove the most positive conversations for Narendra Modi, who also has a larger share of positive mentions/ conversations when compared to Rahul Gandhi.
- Arvind Kejriwal’s anti-corruption campaign and the continuous efforts to push the Lokpal Bill have been found to comprise the most significant portion of his online mentions and conversations in the said duration, mostly positive.
- While on one hand, the key driver of positive conversations for Nitish Kumar is Development and Economy, the negative mentions on this theme are in fact higher than the positive mentions.
- Depth of Engagement:
- Overall reach – Narendra Modi leads on Twitter with the highest reach, and highest number of unique authors, but has the lowest reach per author.
- Reach per author – M. Karunanidhi leads in terms of being connected with the most influential users on Twitter followed by Arun Jaitley, J. Jayalalithaa, Anna Hazare and finally Omar Abdullah.
You can download the full copy of the ‘Blogworks Most Mentioned Political Leaders January – April 2013‘ from our Reports section.
