14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is planning on getting involved in more elections following the strategy it deployed in India.
The company is reportedly looking to replicate parts of the strategy it had in India for other countries that go to polls this year after it was revealed that Twitter was a key tool for politicians and media companies during the biggest democratic elections in the world.
The platform worked with politicians ahead of the elections, allowing them to organize their campaigns over Twitter as well. The company also signed partnerships with mobile and media companies to distribute tweets online and offline.
“The election more than any other moment provides a nice microcosm of the value Twitter can add… we are sharing widely the lessons of this Indian election around the world,” India Market Director Rishi Jaitly told Reuters.
In India, Narendra Modi, the newly elected prime minister, has taken advantage of what Twitter has to offer and the party he comes from, the Bharatiya Janata Party, embraces technology, which certainly helped.
Modi has over 4.4 million Twitter followers and has tweeted nearly 5,200 times, a clear indication to his dedication to involve Twitter in his daily routine.
India is the third largest Internet user base in the world, with some 240 million users. About 35 million of these are Twitter users. About 153 million households in India had access to data from Twitter, however, thanks to the media coverage, as shown by data from TAM Media Research.
Modi plans to make Twitter a central element of his strategy.
It looks like Twitter has set eyes on Brazil, United States and Indonesia, although it could expand its plans to other nations as well. Reports indicate that the company’s top political strategist has already been sent to Brazil to discuss the advantages of working with Twitter with senators.
The “Tweet to Remember” feature that was used in India, enabling users to add the voting date to their mobile calendar by using a simple tweet will likely get used in the United States.
This isn’t the first time that Twitter becomes a tool in the hands of politicians around the world as they seek to inform potential voters about whatever promises they want to keep (or to ignore) if they get elected. Twitter has also been a strong political tool during the Arab Spring uprising in the past few years.