Smriti Irani, Sushma Swaraj or Rajnath Singh: Who is Modi's most social minister?

Recently, new Prime Minister Narendra Modiissued a list of do’s and don’ts for his new council of ministers and not surprisingly, one of these was about using social media.All ministers have been urged to create Facebook pages and sign up on Twitter, in a bid to make all government operations transparent and easily accessible to people.

The move comes as no surprise given Modi used social media extremely effectively during his election campaign and was one of the many sources of his success. Among his council of ministers, he leads them quite comfortably on all major social networks.

While Modi has about 4.63 million followers on Twitter, his ministers are also quickly following his example. All senior cabinet ministers have made sure that they have a fairly strong following and have a high engagement level on both Twitter and Facebook.

According to a report by digital marketing research firm Mind Shift Interactive, ministers active on social media include Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Smriti Irani, Dr Harsh Vardhan and Arun Jaitley

Here’s a quick look at who in the current cabinet are most active on social media.

On Twitter, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has the most number of followers. However, Smriti Irani, the union minister for human resource and development, has the highest klout score among all the other socially active minsters.

On Facebook too, Modi tops them all. It was reinforced again, when in just about four days after its launch, the official Facebook page of the Prime Minister’s Office attracted over 1.1 million ’likes'.

But among the ministers, Home Minister Rajnath Singh has the most active presence on Facebook, followed by Smriti Irani.

[caption id=“attachment_86551” align=“alignleft” width=“600”] Source: Mind Shift[/caption]

In fact, ministers are now announcing future economic policies on social media too. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley Jaitley on Sunday wrote on Facebook to announce he would uphold fiscal discipline, reduce inflation and increase growth.

“Reviving the growth momentum, containing inflation and altering the pattern of growth to gainful employment is today an overriding priority. There is a need to boost domestic low-cost manufacturing and hasten the pace of reforms. Price stability and growth are inter-twined but may require a different strategy,” Jaitley wrote in a post.

Contrast this with theUPA where key ministers such as P Chidambaram, or Pranab Mukherjee when he was Finance Minister, or even former External Affairs minister Salman Khurshid, stayed away from social media. Except for a handful of ministers like Manish Tewari and Kapil Sibal, who joined Twitter closer to the elections, no Congress leaders was accessible on social media.