NEW DELHI, Dec 28: With Prime Minister Narendra Modi leading from the front, social media outreach of I&B ministry and its associated bodies has got a major boost with over 16 lakh followers on Twitter, nearly 90,000 YouTube subscribers and around 30 lakh likes on Facebook.
Senior officials say the Information and Broadcasting ministry has utilised the new media to disseminate information in an unprecedented manner.
“The celebration of former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s birthday on December 25 as the Good Governance Day is just one of the examples of how I&B ministry utilised the new medium aggressively. On Facebook, the ministry posted 35 times, including around 22 plates with Vajpayee’s poetry written on them.
“And as per our information, in a single day, the reach of these posts was approximately 7.5 lakh people,” a senior official told PTI.
On the same day, officials of the I&B ministry also posted another 43 posts on twitter which reached another 4,82,000 people approximately, officials added. These posts were retweeted in one day more than 8,460 times, they added.
The Ministry of I&B and associated bodies like Press Information Bureau, All India Radio (AIR) and Doordarshan have established a sophisticated strategy to lead online coverage of important events live, an official said.
And this strategy is evolving and the ministry is now planning to extensively use ‘Whatsapp’ and develop mobile applications to expand its reach in the social media space.
Citing instances, where the ministry’s use of social media has been quite successful, officials named PM’s address at Madison Square Garden, IFFI opening and closing ceremonies, launch of flagship programmes etc.
“The kind of impact this social media strategy has can be assessed from the fact that the total number of impressions of I&B Ministry’s Twitter account during the period when International Film Festival was held was a substantial 26 lakhs,” a senior official said.
Having established a Standard Operating Procedure to set
the ball rolling on social media spaces whenever an event happens, the ministry is now taking its role of training other departments in the new media quite seriously.
In the recent past, workshops have been held on at least two occasions and another one is being planned in the near future, officials said.
As far as I&B ministry is concerned, bodies like All India Radio, Doordarshan and Press Information Bureau, work in tandem to take the message to the new media.
Giving details, officials said that the twitter handle of I&B ministry has 2.39 lakh followers while there are an additional 3.71 people following the PIB handle. The twitter handles of AIR, DD News Hindi and English also have around 4.14 lakh, 5.03 lakh and 60 thousand followers.
In all they reach a huge 16.14 lakh followers, according to data maintained by officials.
On Youtube, the ministry has 16,000 subscribers while PIB has another 2,783 subscribers. Adding the Youtube subscribers of DD National (46,483), DD News (23,198) and AIR (2,421), the total number of Youtube subscribers of I&B and bodies associated with it is nearly 90,000.
On Facebook, the I&B ministry page has seen in all 6.69 lakh likes, the AIR page another 18.28 likes and DD News 4.5 lakh likes. In all, they constitute nearly 30 lakh likes for all these bodies, officials said.
In addition, The Blog Page of the I&B ministry has 7.2 lakh views while on Google Plus it has 947,612 followers and 23,385,575 views, officials said highlighting how the government is adapting to the changing information scenario. (PTI)
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