Narendra Modi leads social media mentions among political leaders

As India heads for one of most complex general elections in its history in 2014, which will take place in the full glare of social media, Narendra Modi leads the charge for creating the maximum buzz on social media. The first edition of Blogworks India’s Most Mentioned Political Leaders analyses online mentions of the top 20 political leaders being talked about throughout January 2013 to April 2013.

The report finds that Narendra Modi leads with more than thrice as many mentions as the nearest contender, Rahul Gandhi. New entrant to politics, Arvind Kejriwal, is at the fifth position on total mentions. In terms of gender, Narendra Modi has the highest mentions from women (30 per cent) followed by Sushma Swaraj (24 per cent).

Top 20 Indian political leaders mentioned on social media

Source: Blogworks

Interestingly, even as Rahul Gandhi is slightly ahead of Narendra Modi in terms of mentions by younger people between the age group of 18 to 34, he has also received a high number of negative mentions for being portrayed as a youth icon.

For Narendra Modi, the report says that caste and religion has been found to be the most talked about subject, with the Godhra Riots and Akbaruddin Owaisi’s arrest driving most negative mentions for him – clearly implying the masses haven’t forgotten these issues.

In terms of engagement, the report shows:

Overall reach – Narendra Modi leads on Twitter with the highest reach, and highest number of unique authors, but has the lowest reach per author.

Reach per author – M. Karunanidhi leads in terms of being connected with the most influential users on Twitter followed by Arun Jaitley, J. Jayalalithaa, Anna Hazare and finally Omar Abdullah.

You can read the whole report here.