On account of Narendra Modi government’s second anniversary the social networking giant Facebook released an analysis on the NDA government posts. It had shown how the NDA government has been using the social networking as a platform to reach out to the masses. Earlier this year a similar study was done by a team of researchers from the University of Michigan on Modi’s tweets over a five-year period. This research was conducted between February 2005 to February 2015 which helped Modi build a very powerful online brand.
According to Facebook, in this two-year period, his most popular post included the one where he posted with his mother with a caption saying, ‘My mother returns to Gujarat. Spent quality time with her after a long time, and that too on her first visit to RCR.” The post received a whopping 34m likes. Another post in which he thanked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for his support to ‘Digital India’ initiative received 34m likes.
In an analysis done for both social networking giants, Facebook and Twitter, it was studied that Modi is the world’s second most popular politician after the US president, Barack Obama, with more than 18m followers on twitter and 25m followers on Facebook.
Data collected in the top three government initiatives, ‘Make in India’, ‘Digital India’ and ‘Skill India,' gathered support from the public.
The analysis also shows a presence of major cabinet ministers on Facebook. Out of the 50 cabinet ministers in the government 47 were reportedly verified their presence. Besides this, Facebook also released a list of top 10 union ministers based on their performance on its platform. The criteria includes total likes, shares, comments, average daily posts and page size; while in the study done on Modi’s twitter account, it was divided into four phases looking at his early tweets, tweets at the time of elections in Gujarat, during national elections and in prime ministry.
In the top ten list, Modi stood on the first position, followed by Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Minister of Human Resource Smriti Zubin Irani, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Minister of Food Processing Harsimrat Kaur Badal, Power Minister Piyush Goyal, Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari, Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu and former sports minister and now Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal.
Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi, Goyal and Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Rathore have also been using Facebook’s Q&A feature to connect to the masses.
