How Indian Prime Ministerial Candidates Fare Online: Narendra Modi Vs Rahul Gandhi Vs Arvind Kejriwal

Internet and Social Media have now become the one of the most important channels for Political campaigning. Online political campaigning played an important role when Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008.

A lot of credit for Aam Aadmi Party and Arvind Kejriwal’s meteoric rise and win in Delhi state elections goes to how they spread their agenda across masses through internet and social media channels.

With India’s general assembly elections not too far from now, we decided to take look at how our Prime Ministerial candidates are faring online.

While there is no fool-proof way of coming up with exact impact of their online presence, we purely looked at various numbers, which give a approx measure of their popularity.

[Note: While Narendra Modi has already been named Prime Ministerial candidate, it is assumed that Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal are the front runners for their respective parties.]

What Does Google Say?

Here is what Google Trends comparison offers:

While most of us know that Narendra Modi is using online and social media channels effectively, Arvind Kejriwal leads by a large margin when it comes to key moments. If you look at the graph shown above, it is quite clear that he was the most discussed online subject during Delhi Elections in conducted in December.

Arvind Kejriwal’s popularity online was it’s peak when he became the Chief Minister of Delhi and again was most talked about in India when he resigned in late February. Interestingly, his popularity online has suddenly nose-dived since the time he resigned as CM of Delhi.

On the the other hand, it is quite commendable that Narendra Modi has been able to maintain his popularity online through-out the last 3 month period. As of today, out of the 3 candidates, he remains the most popular figure according to Google Trends.

Contrary to other 2 candidates, Rahul Gandhi’s popularity online seems to be quite low. The only time he beat both of them was during his infamous interview with Arnab Goswami, and that was for all the wrong reasons!

Online Mentions

To find out number of times they were mentioned across the web, we simply looked at Google search numbers. Again, Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal did quite well, with former returning about 80 million searches and latter getting 77.5 million searches.

Rahul Gandhi was distant third with 54.4 million mentions online according to Google Search.

Facebook & Twitter Popularity

On Social Media, NaMo is an undisputed king. Both his Facebook and Twitter accounts are updated very frequently. One can definitely applaud NaMo’s social media team; they have done a tremendous job creating a huge online presence.

Arvind Kejriwal’s twitter and Facebook accounts are also very active and probably have the best follower and like count after Narendra Modi. For a party that is not even a year old, there is no doubt that have created a quite a large social media following.

However, as far as Rahul Gandhi goes, we could not even find their official Facebook page. There were quite a few pages, and we took the one that had maximum likes of 347k. But we are not sure if that is the real account, as it is not mentioned “official account” anywhere.

We did a lot of research on other candidates as well as their parties, but unfortunately compared to Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal, everyone else’s presence was miniscule at best.

Guess this comparison gives you fair idea of online popularity of India’s 3 main Prime Ministerial candidates.

It would be great to have your feedback on this!