Like, share, vote: PU student parties hire professionals to run social media pages
These teams, having anywhere between 5-30 members, do everything from handling the candidate’s social media activity, creating content, shooting videos and pictures, and editing final videos with special effects and transitions. This professional service can cost around ₹30,000 per person for the entire campaign.
In a significant shift, professionals have taken over the management of party campaigns for the Panjab University Campus Student Council (PUCSC) elections.
These teams, having anywhere between 5-30 members, do everything from handling the candidate’s social media activity, creating content, shooting videos and pictures, and editing final videos with special effects and transitions. This professional service can cost around ₹30,000 per person for the entire campaign.
From campaign videos to candidate bytes, panel codes, student testimonials, and even memes, the handlers of these social media pages are going all out to grab eyeballs.
Speaking about the trend, Sourav Kansal, editor-in-chief of student-run portal PU Pulse, who has been monitoring social media campaigns of parties over the past years, says, “The game has completely changed with social media coming into the picture. It’s all the more useful during slow weekends when hostel students return home. Social media becomes a handy tool to reach out to these students.”
He added that the content on these pages is carefully curated, and videos are shot with a whole professional team, but most parties would deny they have professional help.
CYSS Chandigarh unit in-charge, Divyansh Thakur said that they have a 20-member student team to run the social media pages. “While they have some experience with political campaigns, they are not professionals and are just students. We have put up helpline numbers in each hostel and they attend to these calls as well,” he said.
ABVP presidential candidate Arpita Malik remains on field throughout the day for campaign stresses on the importance of both online as well as offline campaigns to make a mark. “Social media is important for reaching out to students. Memes make a great impact but campaigning is also important, and we are relying on both for these elections,” she said.
National Students Union of India (NSUI) election in-charge for PU and the party’s national general secretary Dilip Choudhary added that they typically use around a 30-member team for running their social media campaigns.
Former PUCSC president Jatinder Singh, who is now helping run the current NSUI, campaign says that reels have become very important for campaigning. “For my campaign also, reels made a big impact. Back then, I was dependent on a friend from the department to make the reels and edit the video. We didn’t even have professional equipment and had mostly relied on an iPhone for shooting.”
NSUI, however, isn’t as organised as other parties with their social media. There are multiple NSUI pages on Instagram. Choudhary said that he has written to the high command about this and said it is important for NSUI to present a united face.
Rebel NSUI candidate Anurag Dalal, who is fighting the election with support from Democratic Student Front of the evening studies department and Student Organisation of Panjab University, also has a strong social media presence even though this was done in less than a week. Independent candidate Mukul Chauhan also has been running a ‘Team Mukul’ page on social media is also posting professionally shot reels and posts.