NaMo wows Portugal, Italy gaga over RaGa on social media

AHMEDABAD: The Portuguese can’t stop discussing NaMo while the Italians are going gaga over RaGa.
The two politicians leading their parties’ bid for power in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections have been found to have a large fan following on social media in foreign languages.
Social media analysis platform Meruki reports that after English, Portuguese is the second most preferred language to discuss BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi (#NaMo).
Curiously, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s #RaGa is being discussed in Indonesian and Italian languages though Rahul’s posts are in English and Hindi. Modi blogs are translated in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Russian apart from eight Indian languages.
Meruki analysed newsfeeds on social media platforms between March 1 and April 17 and found that in case of Modi, 1.5 lakh feeds were in English and 3,817 feeds in Portuguese. Rahul had 44,991 newsfeeds in English, 6,907 feeds in Indonesian and 4,956 in Italian. Jwalant Patel, co-founder of Meruki, says it is only in case of Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal that the most preferred language after English is Hindi.
Social media experts do not rule out the possibility of "outsourcing". Last year, for instance, senior Congress leaders Ashok Gehlot, Ajay Maken and Digvijaya Singh were found to have a sizeable following in countries like Turkey, Ukraine, Indonesia and Russia on social media. It was believed that they had outsourced the job of popularizing th-eir social media pages — Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter — to groups known as ‘click farms’ in these countries. All three denied having done so.
“Politicians have digital marketing teams that use fake accounts to rig and manipulate ‘likes’, ‘retweets’, ‘favorites’ and ‘comments’. As a result, their hashtags get trended in places like Dhaka, Istanbul, Lisbon, Jakarta and Rome,” said Sathish Isaac, online reputation and perception consultant, Virtual Social Media.
Today, there are several tools, such as ‘socialbuzzstore’ and ‘social tiger’, which are used by individuals and groups to increase numbers on Facebook and Twitter. Agencies are also available round the world who would do it for a price through dummy accounts.