GOVtweets – the advent of twitter in Governance

July 2010 was the month when Ministry of External Affairs created a twitter account, followed by Press Information Bureau and Office of the Prime Minister of India (PMO). Before May 2014, when the last Lok Sabha elections were held, there were only 8 Ministries of the Government of India which had accounts on twitter. Twitter data as of 25^th November 2016, indicates that 13 ministries have created a twitter account in June 2014 and 6 Ministries in July 2014 after NDA come into power. In effect, the number of ministries having twitter accounts increased substantially in the first few months of new government in 2014.

Who is active on Twitter?

Average number of tweets per day across all the ministries is around 9. It can be clearly seen that not all the ministries are twitter active. Ministries that have a large public interface are tweeting more often than otheras.Ministry of Railways has the highest tweet rate per day among all the ministries with 189 tweets per day, followed by Press Information Bureau and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. In fact, there are other twitter accounts of the Zonal & divisional offices of the Railways that send out many more tweets. There are only 5 ministries which tweet more than 10 times a day. 19 ministries send out 2-10 tweets per day and 15 ministries tweet less than twice a day.

Who are most followed?

Twitter community is growing each day and the following of the ministries official twitter channels is increasing at a decent pace.  Average growth in the number of followers across the ministries is 427 per day since their joining. 19 ministries have a increase of 0-50 followers per day. Ministries like External Affairs, Finance, Health, Information and Broadcasting, Human Resources & Development, Home Affairs, Railways, Office of the President of India, PMO and Press Information Bureau, have seen a growth of 400 to 8206 followers per day.

Although there are Ministries/Departments which are highly followed in twitter, there are also Ministries/Departments which are not so well followed by the user community. Ministries like the Ministry of Steel, Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Ministry of Science & Technology have seen a growth of the less than 10 per day in their followers.

Some Ministries/Departments are still taking baby steps on twitter. The Department of Heavy Industry has about 700 followers while the Department of Chemicals has just 1 follower. Ministry of Parliamentary affairs has 57 followers only. Interestingly, some of the ministers in charge of these Ministries are well followed on twitter. A few ministries like the Ministry of Statistics & Program Implementation do not have a twitter presence yet.