Power of Social Media in Political Marketing – An India Based Empirical Study

This study aims to understand the importance of different factors of social media, along with relevant demographic variables of voters to predict a voter’s preferred political brand, in the context of the Indian Lok Sabha elections. To identify the relevant demographic variables, we have gone through previous literature. However, due to the lack of substantial India-based academic literature that could help us to identify the important factors of social media campaign, we referred to US-based academic literature and attempted to obtain the superset of social media impact variables. Thereafter, we conducted focussed group discussions to identify the most important attributes, which we’ve used in our survey study. We have chosen greater Kolkata to conduct the survey. We have used multinomial logistic regression model with voters’ preferred political brand as a dependent variable with four choices. We observed that there is no significant difference between the intercept and final (including all predictors) model and also found that no individual demographic and social media impact variables are significant predictors of voters’ preferred political brand. We also measured comparative effect on different political parties for each independent variable. That would help political marketers to target specific segments with effective communication and campaign plan.