Hyderabad: Despite the TRS having more followers, the Telangana Congress has reached more people on Facebook, the most preferred social media platform in the state despite all the controversies surrounding it.
An analysis done by this paper of both parties, using the socialinsider.io tool from November 5 shows that the Congress is way ahead of the TRS. In one month, the Congress, with 2.26 lakh followers, reached out to 4.96 lakh people while the TRS with 10 lakh followers reached out to 3.66 lakh. UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s first public meeting after formation of state at Medchal was the most engaged video of the Congress.
The documentary on the Kaleshwaram project was a big hit for the TRS. Both parties, on an average, were doing 11 posts each day. Each of the social media team alleges that the other is using bots.
Congress national coordinator for social media Hasiba Amin said, “If followers are real, then engagement would be higher. Engagement activities like comment and share cannot be done by bots. The TRS page boosted from 1 lakh to 10 lakh in just five months. Even if you boost it with a lot of money, their engagement was not even close to us.”
Mr Dileep Konatham, member of the TRS social media team, refuted the claims of using bots. He said, “It was the Congress which purchased bots. We exposed it using fake twitter bots with proof.”
When asked about paying money to boost posts, both parties tried to play this down, saying that they have spent very minimally on the posts.
Paid posts often get more engagement and reach. While the TRS said that about 1 per cent of their posts are paid, Congress said that one good post per day was promoted by paying. About 241posts of 359 posts by the TRS were not boosted. For the Congress about 269 posts were not boosted of the 394 posts. The remaining posts are yet to be classified or are likely to be boosted.
