The Congress party since 2020, and 2022 especially, experienced an exponential growth in its social media following across all major platforms. However, it has had no impact at all on actual poll results. Indeed, data shows that there is an inverse correlation between actual poll results and the INC’s social media performance.
Some might argue that the Congress party did register a great performance in 2024 Lok Sabha Elections. But we have to put it in context. Every incumbent government around the world has suffered the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. The same is true for India.
But even under such circumstances, the Congress party could not win even a 100 seats on its own. It won only 99. 9 of them came from Tamil Nadu, where it is the DMK’s junior partner. 6 came from Uttar Pradesh where it piggybacked on the successes of the Samajwadi Party. The INC won 13 in Maharashtra, where state-specific politics played a huge role in determining the results.
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These are 28 seats where we can safely argue that social media was not a major factor in INC’s victory. Even so, 99 seats is not a great achievement by any metric for a party that ruled India for decades. Furthermore, as the results of state elections before and after the Lok Sabha elections demonstrate, 2024 was clearly a blip and is not reflective of broader trends.
I had argued in my previous article that chasing virality for the sake of it is poor strategy for a political party. Now, the data and charts that I put together with help from xAI’s Grok drives home the point conclusively. The data clearly shows that INC’s exponential growth on social media has had absolutely no impact on election results.
INC’s exponential growth in Social Media
Before going into the data, there are some caveats that we should take note of. The data might not be absolutely 100% accurate but we can conclude with a fair degree of certainty that its accuracy is upwards of 95%. That is more than enough for the purpose of our analysis.
Secondly, we are only looking at data from the official account of the INC. We are not looking at the accounts of its state units, politicians and morchas. That is sufficient for our analysis. Furthermore, we are not making deep comparisons with the BJP for now. We may choose to do so in the near future. But we are avoiding it here.
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Without further ado, let us move forward. The one platform where INC has experienced its greatest success is Instagram. It was lagging behind until 2022 and then it just shot up massively. Between 2023 and now, INC’s follower count on Instagram growed from less than 2 million to more than 10 million.
It’s a similar story on X (formerly Twitter). Between 2018 and 2025, the INC saw its follower count increase from just over 5 million to 11 and a half.
The same is true for YouTube. INC’s subscribers count increased from a million in 2018 to nearly 7 million in 2025.
The only platform that bucks the trend is Facebook. The INC showed the least growth on the platform. Its followers increased from 5 million in 2018 to 8.7 million in 2025. It clearly shows that the INC is not putting as much effort on Facebook as it is on other platforms.
So, without a doubt, the INC has upped its game on social media a lot. And it has a had a great impact on its followers count.
INC Growth on Social Media: Engagement Metrics
Analysing engagement metrics is a bit more complicated. It’s not possible to take into account every single post on X, Facebook and Instagram. In YouTube, views on videos are publicly available, so that isn’t an issue. On YouTube, there’s a clear spike from 2022 in average views.
On Instagram, Grok sampled 42 posts from 2018, 68 posts from 22, 124 posts from 2024 and 89 posts from 2025. We did not take into account every post for this analysis, since our purpose is to capture broad trends and not execute an academic study.
For 2024, the analysis focused on data from the peak election period from 1st March to 4th June. In 2025, we relied on weekly sampling and high engagement posts. In 2018, there were only 42 posts from January to June and October to December. For 2022, the analysis took into account 68 posts March, June, September and December.
The analysis also focused on likes and not overall engagement. The result was consistent with the spike in followers since 2022.
While the data is not sufficient for an academic study, it is more than enough to indicate the broader trends. And the trend is clear, the INC experienced an exponential growth in social media performance since 2022. But has that translated into great performances in elections?
Comparison with election performances
For the purposes of this article, we will look at election results from 2022, the year since INC experienced a spike in social media growth. In 2022, there were assembly elections in 7 states: Goa, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat. Barring Punjab, the BJP was in Government in all these states.
The INC managed to snatch away only Himachal Pradesh from the BJP that year. The elections in Himachal took place in November, 2022. The state has not reelected any incumbent government since 1985. So, the results were not a surprise. Meanwhile, the INC lost Punjab to the Aam Aadmi Party.
In 2023, the INC scored a major victory in Karnataka, where they managed to wrest power from the BJP. In Telangana as well, the INC defeated the incumbent KCR Government. But the most crucial results unfolded in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, where the BJP secured stunning victories in direct contests with the INC.
We don’t have to talk much about the 2024 General Elections. We know what happened then. I will only mention Odisha, which was crucial towards the reelection of Narendra Modi for a third term as Prime Minister. There, the BJP won the Assembly Elections as well, ending the decades-long reign of Naveen Patnaik.
The real story begins after the General Elections. In Haryana and Maharashtra, states where the INC had performed very in Lok Sabha elections, the BJP recorded mammoth victories. The BJP registered its best performance in Haryana ever, winning 48 seats out of 90. In Maharashtra, the NDA won upwards of 230 seats out of 288.
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The BJP took its winning form into 2025 and registered a couple of very important wins. It returned to power in Delhi after decades, ending the 10 year reign of Arvind Kejriwal. And then, we saw what happened in Bihar. The NDA won more than 200 seats out of 243.
One thing is clear from all of this. The INC simply did not experience any spike in its electoral fortunes as a result of its great social media performance. Indeed, it didn’t experience any spike at all. There’s one graph that makes it very clear.
The Matrix, an account on X, shared a chart of year-on-year MLA strength of the BJP and Congress since 2010. I don’t have to say anything. The chart makes my point very clear.
The chart looks even worse when we map the data with INC’s performance on Instagram. As INC’s follower count on Instagram went up, the number of its MLAs in State Assemblies across the country went down.
There is really no other way to put it. The INC has really gained nothing from its social media boom apart from engagement. Even as they turned into elite engagement farmers, their electoral performances declined.
Grok may correct when it says there is an inverse correlation between the two but we have to remember the age old maxim: “Correlation isn’t Causation”. But what is certain is that social media performance really has no impact on election results.
The data confirms my theory that political parties will have to rethink the way they use social media. Or they risk being trapped in a bubble.
