With campaigning for phase two of the Bihar Assembly election ending on Sunday evening, setting the stage for polling on Tuesday, the Congress upped its social media game — the party has launched a video game to engage with young and first-time voters.
Titled Badlo Bihar, it’s a basic game. The players earn points each time they manage to pop out the issues that the mahagatbandhan (grand alliance) has been highlighting such as migration, farmers’ issues, corruption and so on, by pressing on the Congress’s election symbol.
The highlight of the game is the voice-over at the end that says “Bole Bihar, mahagatbandhan sarkar”. The voice-over mimics Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s voice.
The Congress, through its social media campaign, is focusing on micro-targeting the voters, making individual campaigns for the party’s 70 candidates and attempting to hold a dialogue with voters on local issues.
Party’s social media in-charge Rohan Gupta said it had the first-mover advantage, since they had been working in the State for four months now. Their headquarters in Patna had close to 35 volunteers working and this week onwards they have operationalised another one in Purnia, in the Seemanchal belt, for the final lap.
Digital membership
“The pandemic forced us to get innovative since the physical electioneering took a back seat,” Mr. Gupta said. To begin with, the party had started a digital membership drive, and Mr. Gupta said they had managed to enrol nearly six lakh people.
The digital campaign started with Bihar Ki Baat to get feedback from voters to be incorporated in the party’s manifesto. Based on this feedback, the social media team started a campaign of Ka Kiye Ho, seeking accountability from the Nitish Kumar government.
With unemployment being the central theme of the grand alliance’s poll campaign, the Congress has been working on targeting the migrant workers.
Targeted messages
“There are constituencies where farmer’s issues are more important, other constituencies with higher concentration of migrant workers the issues could be vastly different. Accordingly, our messaging was targeted for each of the 70 constituencies that we are working on,” Mr Gupta said. The party was reaching out to four crore people daily.
“Our emphasis is to go local, so we are making local creatives, which are specific to each candidate and his constituency. We ask each of them to provide us videos and photographers from their campaigning. And interestingly, this turned into a way of receiving feedback too on who is active and who isn’t,” Mr. Gupta added.
Apart from targeting voters on Facebook, the social media team has tapped into 10,000 WhatsApp groups. Each group can have up to 200 participants.
In the past four days, the frequency of messages from the Congress has increased.