Aniket Saxena: A volunteer since day one of AAP is shaping AAP campaigns on social media

Aniket Saxena has been working behind the scenes for Aam Aadmi Party since its formation in 2012. 29 years young Aniket started his political engagement with Anna Aandolan when he was in his early twenties. He got involved with the movement after quitting his job in 2012. In fact, Aniket was the one of those who opposed the decision of forming a political party (later known as Aam Aadmi Party). After consulting with senior members and other volunteers, Aniket supported the idea and decided to stick with the party. Since the first day of the formation of AAP, he has been continuously working with the party both in foreground and background. At present, along with other volunteers, he manages AAP’s social media campaigns and helps shape strategies on Twitter and Facebook.

AAP Engagements

Aniket was managing IT related work for the AAP Lucknow chapter after AAP was formed. In Oct 2012 during Bijli-Paani Satyagraha launched by Arvind Kejriwal, Aniket was called by Sanjay Singh (present member of Rajya Sabha), Ankit Lal and others to manage data entry work. Over 7 lakh people pledged during the Satyagraha, all the forms were digitized and data entry work was completed on time. After the Satyagrah, Aniket campaigned for AAP during the 2013 Delhi assembly elections and also served as the campaign manager for Jarnail Singh from Tilak Nagar Constituency.

Aniketh Saxena 1. During AAP 4th National Social Media Conference 2. with Arvind Kejriwal 3. Campaigning in Varanasi 

After 2013 elections, Aniket moved back to Lucknow as the state office in-charge of AAP Uttar Pradesh and worked with Dr. Kumar Vishwas in Amethi during the 2014 general elections. During 2015 Delhi assembly elections, he moved to Delhi and managed Adarsh Shastri's campaign from Dwarka constituency. Post elections he worked with AAP Overseas and then got involved with Social Media team.

#hashtag Wars

#hashtags, tweets and retweets are all about influencing twitter users and spreading the word. Influence is not just a word, it is a form of bonding and there exist multiple PR companies who work just to influence people (or users) for their clients. An influencing message is sent to different users using trends, comments and other interactions. #hashtag war which is very popular on Twitter has never been very popular on Facebook and other social media platforms. A set of campaigns are organized to spread influencing messages.

Bringing a #hashtag into the trending list is dependent on multiple parameters such as organic tweets, location, retweets, number of followers of a user and verified users/handles. The #hashtag war is so popular that in a recent event, Paresh Rawal from BJP tweeted a google doc which contained a set of tweets and the timings of tweets to be tweeted. If a #hashtag is tweeted from multiple accounts from different locations, it is indexed in the trending list of a city or country.

While big political parties like BJP and Congress have large budgets and hire PR companies, they also use large number of members from their social media teams, MP/MLA’s verified accounts and bot accounts (accounts which auto-retweets certain tweets with keywords). Pre-written tweets along with the time of tweets are also provided. On the contrary, Aam Aadmi Party social media campaigns are completely dependent on their volunteers and based on organic tweets only. Volunteers across India and other countries come forward and participate in social media campaigns without getting paid or predefined tweets. Volunteers try to influence users with huge number of followers (like celebrities) and if they get influenced it becomes a golden opportunity for the team to spread their message to non-connected users.

Spreading News

Volunteers collect AAP related news from previous day and share on Twitter and Facebook throughout the day. The social media team also designs other campaign material and shares it on social media. This is how users like us, sitting far from homeland get to know about AAP and it's progress. This team also tweets about AAP’s upcoming plans to create awareness among users. This doesn’t end here, data downloaded from social media sites is also analyzed using available tools. Sometimes strategies don’t work as predicted and give negative outputs. So data analysis is used to re-adjust the strategies.

Friends and Family

29 years young Aniket who recently got married is originally from Uttar Pradesh. Support from his retired parents is very important to him. Aniket is also overwhelmed with the support from his friends and other AAP volunteers. With only 6 month of professional experience, Aniket quit his job in 2012, since then he has worked continuously with AAP. If you are on twitter, you can follow Aniket @aSoulRebellion. 

Read more stories of AAP Volunteers.

AAP USA chapter organizes a weekly conference call on every Sunday at noon 12:00PM EST. More details about the call and the guest can be found at @aapchat (https://twitter.com/aapchat).