BJP can dream about our social media reach, can't achieve it: AAP's IT chief

The Aam Aadmi Party is all set to form the government in Delhi with Arvind Kejriwal as the chief minister. Part of its success in Delhi can be attributed to the kind of buzz that AAP enjoyed in the online world and social media.

On both Facebook and Twitter, AAP has managed to make its presence felt. And the numbers aren’t too bad either. For instance, the Delhi election result week was the most popular week for the party on Facebook. Also AAP’s Facebook page which had 535,264 likes till 3 December now has close to 825,121 likes. The page is seeing nearly 67,000 new likes per week, according to the Facebook chart.

On Twitter too the party did exceptionally well as election day saw hashtags #Vote4AamAadmiParty and #AAPSweepingDelhi trending consistently on the site.

While the social media strategy for Delhi clicked for AAP, the question now is what next. Firstpost spoke to Ankit Lal, who handles information technology for the party, on AAP’s plans for social media in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and beyond. The party has already begun working on local pages for cities and districts and is getting ready to experiment with some newer platforms as well.

More from Politics

‘Vote chori’ row: Can software delete voters’ names, as Rahul Gandhi claims? 'Modi is the most popular leader in the world': Amit Shah hails PM's leadership, reforms & more | Full text

What will the social media campaigns for the 2014 elections be like for the AAP?

Hopefully, we will be fighting 200 plus seats. That is the speculation right now. Even if we fight on all the 545 seats, then also we will be concentrating on urban and semi-urban seats where social media has greater outreach. Those seats come to around 250 to 260.

For example, in Delhi all seven seats will be on the radar. Maharashtra, Gujarat have some seats. In UP. there are around more than 10 seats which will see an impact of social media. We’ll try and get more traction on these seats.

We have already got our state and district pages in place. We are in the process of distributing the charge of these pages to our local teams. They will be managed by the local teams and will be supervised by our core central team. We are trying to implement our swaraj model in social media as well.

All the pages are ready for the respective districts and states . You can see them at facebook.com/aap followed by the name of the district or state.

We also be holding Google Hangouts soon with Arvind to spread the message of our 2014 campaign.

For the Lok Sabha elections, which party would see as the biggest challenger on social media? For instance BJP is pretty well established on the Internet. How will you counter that?

We don’t need to actively counter BJP. What we will do on social media is show the people what the AAP is already doing in Delhi. For example, Dinesh Mohaniya is already tackling water problems in Sangam Vihar. We’ll try and show that on social media and put across the message that even though our people don’t have the power, they are working to solve the problems at local levels.

Plus in the last few days, the kind of social media activity our channels have seen is stupendous. BJP can dream about it, they can’t achieve it.

You also had a Call-Delhi campaign for Delhi elections with volunteers calling people. Is that likely to return? Also will you try out newer platforms online?

This (Call Delhi) will be back in a bigger and better organised way.We’ll also be trying out some new avenues. Till now we have not used Instagram and Pinterest as well and we’ll probably start using these as well.

Now that there’s an AAP government in Delhi, are we likely to see a more active government on social media? Is there a plan for this?

I hope so. Right now have not talked about it to anyone. As per the party policy we have been very active on social media. We’ll try our best to get it implemented. If the Delhi government needs any help my team and I will be available for it.

Of course there are several ways in which social media can be used to help and interact with the local people. From water to road problems, all of this can be tracked and counter through social media in Delhi.

We’ll have to sit down with the departments and see the kind of resources they have and perhaps then chalk out a plan. Currently though we haven’t talked about it with anyone department. For instance, Delhi traffic police has been using social media. How effective they have been is something I would want to know. Arvind has always been open to new technology. I’m hoping something like this will be done.