Imagine the Indian Army Brigade commander in Ladakh tweeting over a face-off between Indian and Chinese soldiers.
That’s one of the things senior officials at Army headquarters here claim to be aiming at in coming years by expanding the scope of their social media domain. There would be a caution on strategic and operational details and anything that goes out in public domain would have to be information which is not classified, the officials, however, underline.
A ministry of defence (MoD) expert committee recently recommended that senior commanders shall have a participative social media presence through blogs so that they stay connected with the rank and file. The committee advocated ‘proactive’ use of social media to counter rumours and sensitising officers on its use.
As of Thursday, the Indian Army had 34-lakh, 17 thousand, two hundred and thirty one (3417231) followers on its Facebook page and the number growing by the hour.
And going forward, in its expanding social media base, Army is also looking at a situation where it could cut down on its recruitment advertisement costs for officials believe a large number of youth are motivated to join them on being given an exposure of day to day activities of the force.
An analysis of the Army’s Facebook page reveals that 48% of the followers belong to the age group of 18-24 years while 6% fall in the 13-17 age group. However, women constitute only 9% the total following.
Further reading into Army’s Facebook presence throws other interesting facts.
From Pakistan, while there are only little over 700 followers, it is at countries like Bhutan, Mexico, Ukraine where it has least following with little over 400 followers.
While over 25 lakh followers are English speaking, 40-odd thousand Hindi speakers follow the Army on Facebook. This, followed by close to four thousand Marathi speaking ones to close to three thousand each Tamil and Bengali-speaking followers. Indian Army is followed by French, Portuguese, Arabic, Dutch, Persian,Japanese, Greek and Spanish speaking people.
Back home, Kolkata has highest number of followers at over three lakh, followed by Lucknow at over two and half lakh, New Delhi at over two lakh while cities like Kollam in Kerala and Karnal in Haryana, Amritsar, Vishakapatnam, Nagpur, Rajkot having less than ten thousand followers.
Indian army personnel use a boat to rescue residents from floodwaters in Chennai on December 3, 2015 – AFP
Chennai, where the Army’s Facebook page helped coordinate SOS requests from residents stuck in recent floods has close to two lakh followers, several of them joining it during the course of the massive rescue operations by the three services along with the Indian Coast Guard.
“Our role during such emergencies like in Chennai get us substantial traction,” says a senior official.