Social Media Strategy Review: Arun Jaitley

This is a part of a series where we pick data from the MTS Election Tracker, crunch numbers and build a graphical representation of them. We have used Konnect Social to track the data along with support from our knowledge partner, Social Rajneeti. Read other articles about Election tracker here.

Contesting the elections from Amritsar for the upcoming Lok Sabha Elections 2014, Mr. Arun Jaitley has been a part of politics since his college days at University of Delhi. He was an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) leader and heightened to be the President of the University Student’s Union in 1974 and now holds a strategic position in BJP as the Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, the Upper house of Indian Parliament.

By profession, Mr. Arun Jaitley is a lawyer and has served as a senior advocate in the Supreme Court of India. He has also been a delegate on behalf of the Government of India to the United Nations General Assembly in June 1998 where the declaration on law relating to Drugs and Money Laundering was approved. Some of his notable achievements in the Indian constitution are the 84^th and 91^st Amendment of freezing parliamentary seats till 2026 and penalising defections respectively.

As a politician, Arun Jaitley has demonstrated phenomenal growth in the success of Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Bihar and Punjab.

His strategy in Amritsar constituency to lure voter was based on enhancing and improving various sectors like Agriculture, Tourism, Infrastructure, Healthcare with special attention to women and youth.

If brought in power, Arun Jaitley’s party promises to improve rural infrastructure, provide low cost credit to farmers, road, rail & power, build 6 polytechnic and Industry Technical Institutes (ITI) and provide entrepreneurial resources required for 25K Small & Medium Enterprises (SME).

Let’s try to visualise and analyse the social media strategy of the political leader.

Facebook

Facebook profile of Arun Jaitley states that he practices Hindu Dharma and recognizes Sarva Dharma Sambhava, has interests in old Hindi music along with law, sports and politics. He has managed to gain 723k followers.

An interesting notice on the page is a ‘My Vision’ tab which enlists various goals of upliftment of poor and downtrodden, upbringing of manufacturing sector and empowering the youth. His page also has plugins dedicated towards his political journey and asking for donations for BJP. His official page has a simple profile picture and a cover picture with Mr. Narendra Modi asking for both of them to be elected this season.

A parallel page for Amritsar has been managed by the name of Arun Jaitley for Amritsar and mentions of this page are present on the official page. Posts and updates on both the pages are simple, polite ranging from Hindi, English to Gujarati. There are regular updates on the page providing updates on election campaign by the name “The Campaign Diary”.

Through his video messages and constant appeal for voting, Arun Jaitley manages to engage 124k fans on the page.

Above graph shows the number of followers of various politicians according to their Facebook page.

In terms of percentage engagement of fans on Facebook, Arun Jaitley is leading with 13% followed by Akhilesh Yadav and Narendra Modi at 10 % each as shown in the graph depicted below.

This graph shows the plotting of total engagement/ percentage of engagement of fans with respect to the name of political leaders. The engagement is highest in case of Smriti Irani and Narendra Modi has the highest number of fan base according to the graph. Arun Jaitley maintains a decent fan base with balanced percentage of engagement of fan.

Twitter

It became a breaking news when Arun Jaitley joined Twitter previous year in 2013 as he was seen digging pot-shots at Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in his second tweet itself which fetched around 750 retweets, 277 favourites and accounted him with around 9000 followers.

Since then, Mr. Arun Jaitley has been quite frequent in updating his 190k followers with the elections strategy, promoting his party and Mr. Narendra Modi as Prime Ministerial candidate.

Mostly tweets are centred on writing updates of his campaign, wishing followers on various festivals and occasions. However, few tweets are also centred at taking digs at opposition parties.

The following graph illustrates the number of followers on Twitter plotted again the names of politicians.

Looking at his Twitter mentions plotted over date below, he has maintained a balanced graph all these days with normal posts. Additionally, number of tweets is also stagnant.

Elsewhere on Social Media

Apart from Facebook and Twitter, the opposition leader also has an active Google Plus account, YouTube channel and a website.

YouTube

His videos range from videos of his election strategy for Amrtisar elections to his speeches in Rajya Sabha on promoting food security bill, Liberhan Commission and trial of Babri Masjid which have managed to fetch a subscriber base of 70 with total views counting 7,479 views on his official YouTube channel.

Google Plus

Maintaining a normal engagement through his speech videos, the Google Plus page has 24,858 followers with approx. 16k views.

Sentiment Analysis

In the last 7 days, Arun Jaitley has received 2738 Twitter mentions comprising of 21 negative mentions and 526 web mentions. According to #MTSElectionTracker, Arun Jaitley stands 4th out of 15 politicians active on social media after Narendra Modi, Smriti Irani and Shashi Tharoor.

The sentiment analysis according to the below pie chart represents a large chunk of neutral sentiment because Arun Jaitley tries to be very careful in his speech and his strategy. However, there is negative sentiment of 4% particularly due to his remarks on Rahul Gandhi and Robert Vadera.

Going by the below graph, Arun Jaitley’s comments on Rahul Gandhi’s Ullu barb that voters are not fools have contributed to negative sentiments on 17^th and 18^th April and on 21^st April with Amrinder over 1984 Sikh riots and Bhopal Gas tragedy. Rest, on other dates between 17^th and 22^nd April, the sentiment is neutral throughout. During this complete week, there is no positive sentiment in the analysis. The analysis represents the sentiment of various information published on internet. This analysis is based on the opinion of article written on the protagonist where green, yellow and red represent positive, neutral and negative sentiments respectively.

Few headlines of the negative sentiment analysis of 17^th April are as follows:

Performance on Websites

An interesting feature of the MTS Election Tracker is that it tracks the performance of politicians on various news portals and other web sites. Going by the graph, none of the representations depict positive sentiment. Hindustan times has maintained a neutral sentiment through 6 articles based on Arun Jaitley during the time frame considered here with few other sites like ndtv.com and deccanherald.com. However, Times of India, DNA India and Zee news have represented negative sentiment on their articles to varied extent.

Below is the recent compilation of the news collated by Election Tracker. This keeps an account of all the information published on the internet.

Conclusion

Arun Jaitley’s growth on Social Media platforms has been phenomenal and his presence allows him to make his vision and strategies heard to his followers in a comprehensible manner.

Although, his presence seems to be a responsive strategy in order but has been having emphasis to the politician and party effectively.

Whether this strong promising career in a strong opposition party would let him win the faith and trust of aam junta of Amritsar or not, only time will tell. We wish Mr. Jaitley all the best and wait for the D day.

Expert Opinion

Rahul Jain, Director – Digital Marketing & Sales, Social Rajneeti, a digital marketing solutions provider  that specializes in online reputation management and promotional needs of politicians says:

Arun Jaitley has managed to garner interest in the minds of his followers, whether offline or online with a well-maintained image and outlook. However, his proclamation of the Hindu dharma belief on his Facebook page can be frowned upon and may cost him a valuable vote bank of people from various faiths.

When appearing on social media platforms, I wonder how and why the politicians of a secular state feel the need to align with a particular faith. However, such questions will continue to rise for many a politicians.

Having been an opposition party candidate for a long time, he has managed to create quite a stir on the social media scenario with his ideologies, propaganda and digs at other politicians. Whether or not this will tip the vote bank in his favour is a result that is best awaited.