Before Rahul, Team Modi picks Obama as its next target

 He may have lost out to Obama in 2011, but this year Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s cyber team is going all out to prove he’s the most popular political leader on social media.

In 2011, Modi’s supporters claim he was neck and neck with Obama during Mashable’s social media awards and may evenhave been ahead.

However, when the results were declared, he finally lost because the judges decided that only votes didn’t count and other metrics like engagement with supporters did. Some, understandably cried foulover artificial intelligence losing out to actual user engagement.

This time around however, the BJP poll campaign chief’s cyber team has no intention of losing and is already reportedly working on defeating the US President.

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They have a tough task ahead. The US president is no slouch on Facebook, with 3.63 crore likes on his homepage compared to Modi’s 2.62 crore.

Obama’s also got a whole nation of followers on Twitter with around 3.46 crore followers presently and has tweeted 9,626 times so far. Modi on the other hand has around 19 lakh followers on the micro-blogging site and has tweeted 2,682 times.

But the IT cell of the BJP has already begun work to remedy this and around a fortnight back sent online forms to all fan pages of Modi on Facebook to merge with the parent page in order to accumulate all the ’likes’ onto one page, reports the Economic Times.

A senior BJP functionary has been quoted as saying:

We have a team in Hyderabad which has been paid for the job. ‘Narendra Modi for PM’ will merge into the official campaign fan page once Modi’s name is officially declared by the BJP. Besides this, Every MLA in Gujarat and outside the state has been asked to manage their Facebook pages and garner ’likes’. Some MLAs have been given the target of almost 1 lakh likes on Modi’s parent page

While Obama’s position on social media may seem unassailable, Modi’s continuing growth in national politics will only ensure he rises further on the social media charts.

However, given the extent to which the Gujarat Chief Minister has managed to polarise people across the nation, despite his renewed push for dominance over social media, his victory remains as uncertain as an electoral one for now.