The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is leveraging technology in a big way in the run up to the Gujarat Assembly polls. While social media presence has always been the forte of the party, in the latest edition of women's town hall conducted online by Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj, the party was able to reach out to 1.5 lakh women directly, as data from the party's information and technology department suggests.
Apart from the direct connect, thousands were reached indirectly via other online platforms such as the Facebook pages of Chief Minister Vijay Rupani and the BJP.
"The Mahila Town hall with the External Affairs Minister in Ahmedabad was yet another innovative use of social media to connect with the electorate for a purposeful dialogue. #MahilaTownhallwithSushmaji was the top trending hashtag in Gujarat and the country as 14,000 tweets were done in just one hour while the event was live. This shows we have been able to reach the remotest of locations of the state using internet-based platform. The entire exercise was a mix of two- and one-way conversation. We were able to reach, one way or the other, around 1.5lakh women at once," BJP's national information and technology head Amit Malviya told DNA.
In terms of the number of women reached, 3,000 of them connected at the central location, while 2,200 connected through six locations which were two-way, in the sense that women asked the Union minister questions too. There were 30 one-way locations from which 11,000 women logged on to the minister.
Apart from this, the BJP's Gujarat Facebook page received over 60,000 views, while over 50,000 views were recorded on Rupani's Facebook page. Earlier, on September 10, party chief Amit Shah had conducted a Town hall under the banner of the 'Adikham Gujarat' (Resolute Gujarat) banner. Shah's Youth Town Hall had recorded 10,000 questions on Facebook, 12,000 on the BJP website, and over 6,000 questions on Twitter while it had been attended by over a lakh BJP workers from around 250 locations.
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