Telangana: BJP bars its social media units from flooding followers online
Hyderabad: The BJP in Telangana state directed its social media volunteers to focus and strengthen party’s presence in Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp, to an extent that specific dos and don’ts were also issued.
Participate in Twitter trends, delete comments posted by Opposition party followers, take care of spelling mistakes and spend at least 1-2 hours every day were some of the rules. It also called for avoiding good morning, good night messages and having sufficient time gap between posts.
Social media coordinators were appointed across the state starting from the booth level. With a mission statement, “Reach and Engage", the BJP has roughly about 4,000 social media volunteers and is targeting to increase it by 15,000.
Separate rules were published for each platform ranging maximum of 26 rules for managing Facebook pages to minimum 14 to handle Twitter.
One of the rule for Whatsapp said, “In case of any mistake please accept, don’t argue in the group and try to solve the issue through one-to-one individual chat.”
On the other hand, one of the rule for Facebook was, “Don’t post sensitive information which can disturb the social peace of your area.”
Telangana BJP IT cell convener Venkat Ramana said, “These are important as in one of the cases, the post of a social media coordinator ended up in police complaint. We do not want to face such issues, so we have a set of dos and don’ts.”
“What we do is form teams and have res-ources at district, state, mandal and ‘Shakti Kendra’ (booth) levels. At any point of time from national level to booth level, we should be able to keep people informed about any party-related programmes, schemes and protests. Day-to-day programmes should go to the lowest level in the party cadre and as well as society in the form videos, infographics and texts.”
For the selection of volunteers, education was not the criteria, but ability to use smart phone and social media and their presence in whatsapp groups.
Mr Ramana said some people were stationed in-house and some others did it as voluntary service. Furthermore, computers and softwares were procured at times based on the mechanism in the party for different levels, he added.
An IT workshop was conducted for the social media co-ordinators in Telangana under the guidance national IT cell convener Amit Malviya.
There were guidelines for conveners as well, which included, “induct more social media volunteers and sympathisers in your area”, “spend 1-2 hours on daily Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Whatsapp groups” and “appreciate the good work done by your fellow team member and share the post of retweet.”
