PTI and its love affair with social media

With the ouster of Imran Khan from the Prime Minister’s House, a never-before-seen uproar was felt on the streets of Pakistan, with many people out on the streets to protest against his ouster. Major ripple effects were felt across social media where PTI and Imran Khan were the top trends on Twitter. Imran Khan set a record for having the highest number of people listening to him on Twitter Space with over 161K people listening to him. So, what is the reason behind PTI having a strong foothold across social media? So much so that they have been ruling over social media for the past decade?

PTI’S Twitter space strategy was a huge success with it laying a foundation for a digital jalsa and becoming a trendsetter for other political parties in Pakistan to follow. With political rivals like Ali Tareen even listening to his Twitter Space and there were rumors that Bilawal Bhutto and Maryam Nawaz were also listening on their fake IDs. According to Maryam Nawaz, most of the listeners were from Bot ID but the reality is they were real people. 60% of the population of Pakistan falls under the 18-45 demographic. Even a 12-year-old kid knows and supports Imran Khan, and these are the very same people who use smartphones or are in the smartphone generation, and around 60 million people use smartphones in Pakistan. Obviously when a political party or a person is trending all across the social media people would tend to get curious as to what that person was saying, so it is highly unlikely that out of those 161K listeners, most of them were bot IDs.

But this popular social media support did not exist before 2011. But Imran Khan made full use of the social and technological revolution that was taking place in Pakistan at that time and raised his voice on all the relatable topics on w which the common man could relate to. Be it women’s issues, Rich people’s issues, poor people’s issues, educated people’s issues, or uneducated people’s issues, he raised his voice on every issue, and slowly his social media started gathering huge followers. Now here, you might say that the rest of the party used to say the same thing, but they mostly use old forms of advertisements like billboards or newspaper ads, Imran Khan had the foresight that traditional advertising was dying and used social media to enhance his reputation. Also, the fact that he had a huge fan following before he started his politics, he was relatively corruption free compared to other politicians, and was a former cricketer who had won the world cup, was a philanthropist by making Shaukat Khanum Hospital and NUML University.

All of this we knew thanks to the PTI social media marketing team which consisted of young men and women who were well known in the art of social media strategy making. If we had said this to any other political party to effectively use social media, they would have laughed at us because it’s filled with boomers and the old generation who don’t understand the power of social media, instead of using the age-old tactic of going to every alleyway and spreading their words.

Other political parties used to make of Imran Khan by saying he was prime minister of Facebook only, but in 2018 he proved everyone wrong. In 2013 a 15-year-old kid turned 20 when the 2018 election rolled around and he was able to for Imran Khan without any trouble. They set the target market of the youth and it was their recipe for success.

It is very possible that in the next elections in 2023, Imran Khan could return as the prime minister, let’s just hope he doesn’t make the same mistakes he did in his previous tenure.