How 10 IIT Bombay Students Helped Aam Aadmi Party Stump BJP on Social Media

Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party created history on Tuesday by winning 67 of Delhi's 70 seats. The massive sweep is now, in part, being attributed to its successful and well-planned social media campaign.

A group of 10 young students from IIT Bombay worked day and night, going through thousands of tweets, Facebook messages to assess voter views and public opinion.

AAP created a research tool in November last year to trawl thousands of social media posts to assess public opinion, which helped it shape its massive 70-point agenda for its manifesto that promised everything from water, electricity, WiFi to women's security.

Each of the topics was chosen after going through thousands of views online. The students from IIT Bombay developed an algorithm that would sift through the main points and public opinion at any given point.

"Our main motive was to make a sentimental analysis which will give us numerical data on what's happening on Twitter. We made a tool which collects the data of 1000 AAP supporters, 1000 BJP supporter handles and some neutrals. Then, we analysed them on a daily basis to see what was happening," said Divyank, one of the IIT students involved in developing the algorithm.

"We didn't have money for print or electronic media. Social media was the only way," said another IIT student Ratnaik.

India has nearly 100 million Facebook users and 33 million on Twitter. Both are considered an important vote bank, especially with the young voters. Mr Kejriwal took the social media by storm, not just with Twitter wars with the BJP, but used the social media app Mango, which became an aam aadmi ka radio, Quora, a Q&A site, online platform Frankly Speaking , Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and the results have been nothing less than simply rewarding.

Even on polling day when all other politicians were holding their breath, Arvind Kejirwal tweeted an interview he did for a satire website which poked fun at his style. If that established his young vibe, an image of him hugging his wife Sunita became the most tweeted on Tuesday, marking the end of the virtual campaign, resulting in sweet victory.