A page titled 'My First Vote For Modi' has the highest number of advertisements to its name (2,765)
Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, nearly 30,457 advertisements related to politics or topics of national interest were put up on Facebook, with an estimated expenditure of Rs 6.54 crore, according to data from Facebook's Ad Library Report.
In a bid to become more transparent in its advertising practices, Facebook releases a weekly summary which has data about advertisements viewed by the public.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reportedly has the most number of ads. A page titled 'My First Vote For Modi' has 2,765 advertisements to its name, the highest among all, while another page called 'Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat' comes second with 2,429 advertisements. The second page is the highest spender; it spent Rs 20 lakh between March 10 and March 16.
The report also gives a glimpse of popular search terms. The top term was 'BJP', followed by 'Congress', 'Narendra Modi', 'Rahul Gandhi' and 'India'.
While the traction on these words has been high, data from Twitter shows that there was no promoted content from either of the parties in the past week.
Analysts believe social media will have an important role to play in the upcoming elections, even as the Election Commission has said it will be monitoring these platforms for misuse.
The BJP used social media effectively during its 2014 campaign. The US elections in 2016 established clear data on the impact of the platform for communication and influencing.
"According to their survey, 44 percent of US adults received information about the 2016 presidential election from social media. That is more than the percentage cited for either local or national print newspapers," an article in the Journal of Political Marketing, titled 'Introduction: Social Media, Political Marketing and the 2016 US Election', noted.
The research noted that a strong social media presence helped Donald Trump come out on top while competing with Hilary Clinton in the presidential election.
