ISLAMABAD – During the election campaign, the social media became one of the powerful tool sources for communication for the candidate of different parties which has changed the traditional techniques of campaigning.
In the last few years, the candidates to influence voters, they used to hold corner meetings, door to door campaigns and drive in vans speaking through loudspeaker.
The political parties used to invest heavily in print media to get coverage of political activities; they can now campaigning through social media, within no time.
Various mainstream political parties have hired services of social media professionals in order to reach out to the maximum number of people for the forthcoming general elections.
All major political leaders especially Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan, Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Maryam Nawaz are the regular users of Twitter and have a great following.
However, PTI Chairman Imran Khan is the most popular leader on micro-blogging website Twitter in Pakistan with his followers reaching around 8.03 million. Hence his tweets’ likes reach thousands within a few minutes. Maryam Nawaz comes second with more than around 4.73 million while Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has around 2.72 million followers on Twitter.
Similarly, the three political parties have official party accounts on Twitter as well on which PTI took the lead as its followers are around 3.53 million while PML-N and PPP have around 94,400 and 54,800 followers respectively.
Moreover, on Facebook too, the PTI is the most popular with 8.2 million followers while official PTI account has 5.8 million followers. On the other hand, Maryam Nawaz Sharif’s official page has 267,147 followers while PML-N’s Facebook page has 2.6 million followers.
Similarly, PPP’s official page on Facebook has over 195,663 followers while Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s Facebook followers are 156,655.
