In long-drawn Lok Sabha polls, how YouTube Shorts, Insta Reels ruled the roost

The Lok Sabha election campaign this time took the form of the proverbial elevator pitch as parties understood that with falling attention spans they had to drive home the message in as little time as possible. So, more than posters and hoardings, candidates from across the political aisle, equipped with an arsenal of editing tools on Instagram and YouTube and copyright-free music, made an effort to make reels and shorts.

If in 2014 Narendra Modi, then on the cusp of power at the Centre, created a buzz of change by incorporating hologram projection technology in his campaign, in 2019 the game substantially moved to social media platforms and private messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The tech story of the campaign this time was snappy, bite-sized messages and speeches on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, with a dash of background music portraying candidates both as strong and benevolent.

Both the BJP and the Congress, and their main leaders, exemplified this latest shift in India’s biggest digital election so far. Between April 1 and May 30 (the last day of campaigning), Modi’s official YouTube channel uploaded 1,222 full-length videos with an average view count of about 44,000 per video. In contrast, the channel uploaded 258 YouTube Shorts in the same period and the average views of these short-form videos were nearly twenty times more at around 8.5 lakh views. The real clincher was Instagram Reels, where Modi’s mere 37 short videos garnered close to 100 crore views, or 2.7 crore views per Reel on average.

The use of short videos for online campaigning was a lot more pronounced in the case of Congress’s Rahul Gandhi who uploaded 185 Shorts and garnered considerably more eyeballs than the PM at around 67 crore views. But