Rahul Gandhi has been aggressively using social to reach out to the masses.
The 132-year-old Congress party has gone full throttle on its digital presence. From senior party leaders, including Congress President Rahul Gandhi, to the cadre and party workers, each one of them is tapping into the potential of the digital medium.
The party has chalked out an aggressive social media strategy to reinvent itself and connect with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India. At the
Congress conclave in Delhi, several party leaders used the 'Twitter Mirror', a feature that allows people to take selfies by just tapping the screen. The photo can be patched to an event's Twitter feed or a handle, which then appears as a post and accepts comments. Senior party leader P Chidambaram, Sanjay Jha, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma were among those who used the feature at the two-day event.
#CongressPlenary was a huge trend on Twitter yesterday, which witnessed a lot of commentary around the party's sharp attack on BJP.
The party brought actor-politician Ramya as in charge of its social media and IT. The 35-year-old Kannada star joined the Congress in 2012. Her posts are often bold and opinionated and positioned to bait the ruling BJP.
Rahul Gandhi, who has been pretty active on Twitter, regularly attacks the ruling government, the BJP and PM Modi in his scathing, witty and sometimes
filmy tweets. His party's heavyweights, too, sign in to express their displeasure, inform and often to initiate a dialogue with their followers. The digital team has been pushing more creatives, running polls, quizzes through multiple party handles, tweeting and retweeting. The party's youth wing is also quite popular on Twitter.
On Saturday, Mr Gandhi's new Twitter handle
"@Rahul Gandhi" replaced his "@OfficeofRG". In his tweet to announce the change, he urged users to keep writing to him. "I look forward to your feedback and comments and to continuing my dialogue with you via Twitter and other platforms," he tweeted.
Mr Gandhi, who became the President of Congress in December, took time before he joined Twitter in 2015. However, over the last year, especially around Gujarat assembly polls, his aggressive use of the platform to reach out to the masses was seen as both effective and refreshing. It even forced his critics to ask who was tweeting for him.
"People (have) been asking who tweets for this guy... I'm coming clean..it's me..Pidi..I'm way smarter than him. Look what I can do with a tweet..oops..treat!," Mr Gandhi had tweeted crediting his pet dog with his rise in popularity on the social media site.
Rahul Gandhi has over six million followers and his party is followed by 4.2 million users on Twitter compared to PM Modi's 41 million and the BJP's 9.27 million. Mr Gandhi was accused by the BJP of using bots or software-driven accounts that automate actions like retweets and likes, to inflate his following on the site, but the Congress has dismissed the allegations.