Narendra Modi Got More Mentions Than Messi During the Election Season

Let me play a spoiler here. We have been noticing amazing action on Social Media during and after Indian Election 2014. The run up that started with Congress Leader Shashi Tharoor started using Twitter for daily interaction with people. The follow through of Narendra Modi’s just most amazing political campaign, and a Robinhood campaign by Arvind Kejriwal took the Indian Social Media rolling for over 100 days.

Now, let us compare how big was it actually? Twitter has recently mentioned that Indian elections saw over 43 million tweets this time. The numbers look amazing.

I took 7 recent events that happened in the World in the last 30 days, and have compared prominence of each of these events in Twitter. The keywords taken for each of these are not exhaustive but only major keywords that influenced each of these events are taken. The sample is a good representative of the overall.

Share of Voice

Out of the 6 events considered, the most talked about has been the run up for the FIFA World Cup 2014, which takes 35% of the share of buzz. Indian Elections remains as second with 18%, and Russia-Ukraine issue takes the third at 12%.

US Politics and China-Vietnam recent conflict are close with 11% each. The smallest of the events considered is IPL with 4% buzz share. Nigeria Kidnapping case has more than double the buzz share than IPL.

Diving into the World Cup Conversations

Brazil, the host country for World Cup, is the most talked topic around the FIFA World Cup. Ronaldo and Messi follows. Brazil gets over quarter of buzz share, while Ronaldo remains second at 19%. Messi and World Cup remains third at 17% each. This shows the significance of Portuguese striker Ronaldo and decreasing popularity of Argentine striker Messi.

Inside Indian Elections

During the Indian Elections, the most talked topic remained “India”, which stood at 46%. Modi followed at 38%, while Gandhi remained at 11%. Kejriwal received a buzz share of 5% among the Top 4 topics.

The Top 10: Obama, China Leads

Among the topics under the chosen category, Obama lead the table while China followed. India stands as the fourth most talked topic after Brazil at third. Narenda Modi remains at 6 with 7% buzz share. Modi is among the 4 personalities in Top 10 topics – Obama at 1st, Ronaldo at 5th and Messi at 8th. Russia and Ukraine misses the top 10, and remains at 11th and 12th position respectively. Both have 4% buzz share. Following at 13th and 14th position are Boko Haram and Putin with 3% buzz share each.

Ending Thoughts

From the data above, Indian Elections might seem a smaller Twitter event. But that’s not true. We are comparing the active participation of global audience in the larger World events or issues that has a Twitter audience of over 500M users to Indian Election that got interest from Indian Twitteratis who are around 40 million plus some 20 million interested folks around.

This is interesting that Modi has become a celebrity in last 30 days that’s bigger than Messi. Not bad at all. And remember, this is the time when La Liga and other major European Club leagues are on.