BJP's manifesto outnumbers rivals in social media mentions

With the 2014 General Elections underway, voters have been closely evaluating the manifestos of AAP, BJP and the Congress. Conversations on social networks have been buzzing with netizens discussing the various developmental programmes promised by the political parties.

TO THE NEW, an integrated digital services network, has released a report that analyses digital conversations across various social platforms such as Twitter, forums and news sites that took place within three days from the date the manifesto was released for each party.

The report, powered by ThoughtBuzz, the social media analytics arm of the company, also tracks the sentiment around the manifesto and shares "word clouds" that highlight the key sentiments dominating the social platforms.

The report reveals that mentions of BJP's manifesto far outnumbered those of political rivals AAP and Congress, with a whopping 76,662 mentions on the social platforms in a span of within three days of the release of the party manifesto. In contrast, Congress had 45,604 mentions followed by AAP with 33,250 mentions.

The report findings further reveal that the discussion on AAP manifesto had the most positive outcome amongst the three parties, 34 per cent had a positive tone, 54 per cent had a neutral tone and 12 per cent of the tonality was negative. About 57 per cent of the discussion on the Congress manifesto had a neutral tone, 30 per cent was negative while only a mere 13 per cent of the tonality was positive.

On the other hand, 65 per cent of the discussion on the BJP manifesto had a neutral tone, 25 per cent was positive while only 10 per cent of the tonality was negative. In the three-day duration, the hashtag #copycatmanifesto, created a lot of buzz on the digital space receiving a total of 41,164 mentions.