New Delhi: The electoral battle in the national capital, which is going to polls on May 12, is heating up. The biggest clash in Delhi is between Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Delhi chief Manoj Tiwari and Congress veteran leader Sheila Dikshit, but when it comes to popularity on social media network, Tiwari takes a clear lead from the former Delhi Chief Minister.

With almost nine times the number of followers and 20 times the number of tweets, Manoj Tiwari is taking the lead on social media from Sheila Dikshit. An analysis of their Twitter accounts shows that Bhojpuri singer turned politician Manoj Tiwari has utilised social media more effectively with a total of seven lakh followers while Dikshit could manage only 80,000 followers.

MyNation did a social media sentiments analysis along with Cybersecurity NGO Root64 foundation and data analyst Vishesh Tripathi. However, these trends are based on data captured from social media websites and other open sources and do not reflect a voting pattern. At a time when social media is the most significant political campaigning platform, sentiment analysis is an indicator of the popularity of political leaders.

“Usually celebrities get more followers on social media than politicians. But in this case, Tiwari is competing against highly popular Delhi Congress chief and three-time chief minister Sheila Dikshit. Interestingly, Tiwari joined Twitter in August 2015. So all of his followers were added in the last four years when he was most active as a politician and not as film an actor or a singer. This is a clear indicator that Tiwari has managed to attract more people with his political work,” said Amit Dubey, founder of Root64 foundation.

The analysis of the social media presence of these two leaders on Twitter shows that Sheila Dikshit was not very active on Twitter, and recently her activity has become more frequent as she has started giving opinions on different issues while Manoj Tiwari seems to be an avid social media user who has been vocal in raising his voice in the virtual world. Sheila Dikshit has posted 200 tweets in 635 days as compared to 33 days taken by Manoj Tiwari.

Analysis of one month shows that Manoj Tiwari has tweeted around an average of five posts a day, but Sheila Dikshit is still shying away from using the micro-blogging site with not even one tweet a day.

This is reflected in social media influence as tweets by Manoj Tiwari are retweeted almost three times more than Sheila Dikshit.

What is interesting here is that although less active of the two, Sheila Dikshit is now getting an accelerated growth in terms of adding followers.  She is getting twice the number of new followers every day as compared to Tiwari.

Manoj Tiwari

Sheila Dikshit

During the election phase, Manoj Tiwari is tweeting almost 10-12 tweets every day.  He is entirely consistent and vocal on every issue.

Sheela Dixit is posting limited opinions on social media. There have been months when she has not even tweeted once.  However, she has been quite vocal about the Congress’ poll promise - NYAY and other agendas raised by party president Rahul Gandhi. 

The analysis shows that the keywords used by Manoj Tiwari are mostly related to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Almost 70% of his tweets revolve around Modi.

Tweets by Sheila Dikshit definitely endorse Congress policies like NYAY. Most of her other tweets are on other nonpolitical events.