Political messaging- share and scare phenomonon

Abstract

Social media today is an essential piece of any business marketing strategy. The utility of social media from the business’s point of view is to create a brand name and increase brand visibility. Politics too is not different in this regard. Almost all major political parties in India maintain active social media handles and try to leverage it to further their ideology and messages. Through this project, we wanted to identify characteristics which lower the apprehension barrier for the social media users and enhances their comfort level while sharing messages. We tried identifying the message themes which people feel at ease with and connect easily. We also tried identifying topics which prohibits public acknowledgement of association. Upon analyzing the twitter data from major political handles of the country, we found that there are evident commonalities in well shared messages. The observation is equally true for messages which received much lower than average shares. The messages which received higher than average shares focused on - 1. Criticizing the system as opposed to using insinuations against political opponents 2. Associating with nationalistic ethos and propagating nationalistic sentiments 3. Effectively using sarcasm and highlighting the irony in approach of their political adversaries 4. Interspersing wit and fun in their messages The messages which received lower than average shares focused on – 1. Providing plain political info regarding rallies and projects/schemes without establishing relevant connection with benefits associated 2. Describing the political ideology and political positions vaguely without tangible evidences 3. Politicizing negative events like crimes, deaths, accidents Some of the topics like “political allegations” featured equally in both high share and low share categories. To resolve this conundrum, we identified other themes associated with allegations for highly shared and less shared messages. Upon crunching data, again a few clear trends emerged. The message containing allegations which received substantial shares were those which attached allegations with indications of irony, nationalistic ethos and call to action to prevent those. The messages which received less shares typically combined allegations with unqualified analysis and attempted to position themselves on higher moral ground without evidence. We finally offer some recommendations in terms of constructing political messages in order to generate more traction in terms of sharing. Generally, in order to make the message more shareworthy connecting it to some feat of nation, religion and irony of opposition is found to be beneficial. On the other hand, adding random political information and unfounded claims regarding supremacy generally make the public uncomfortable while sharing.