It seems the fascination for following Bollywood stars on Twitter never wanes.
Of the 10 most-followed Indian Twitter accounts, nine are from the film industry.
With 16.4 million followers, Narendra Modi (the only other account) is the third most-followed Indian account.
A blog post by Twitter India said the number of followers of Modi has quadrupled from 4 million to 16 million since May 2014, when he assumed charge as Prime Minister. It said that he is the biggest gainer on the top 10 list in 2015. As on December 1, Amitabh Bachchan remains on the top with 18.1 million followers. The ‘Bollywood Khans’ – Shahrukh, Aamir and Salman – occupy 2nd, 4th and 5th most-followed accounts with 16.5 million, 15.5 million and 15 million followers, respectively.
Actresses such as Deepika Padukone (12.3 million followers) at 6th position, and Priyanka Chopra (11.8 million) at 8th position are the only two heroines on the top-10 list of most-followed Indian accounts. Hrithik Roshan (11.9 million followers), Akshay Kumar (10.6 million) and AR Rahman (9.5 million) occupied 7th, 9th and 10th positions, respectively. Twitter was used as the main platform by users to provide reports, disseminate critical information and coordinate local relief efforts during the floods in Chennai. According to the blog post, local citizens sent over 1.4 million tweets using hashtags such as #ChennaiRains, #ChennaiFloods and #ChennaiRainsHelp to crowd-source assistance and help each other through this natural disaster.
Even the Delhi and Bihar Assembly elections garnered enough attention on Twitter in 2015. There were over 10.8 million tweets related to Delhi elections during the 30-day campaign period.
The blog post said that Twitter provided front-row access to the unfolding conversations on Bihar elections during October-November.
Selfie hashtag Modi, who spoke on a Haryana Sarpanch’s initiative on ‘selfie with daighters’, asked the countrymen to share selfies with their daughters while speaking at ‘Mann Ki Baat’ programme on All India Radio on June 28. Following this, the hashtag #SelfieWithDaughter started trending within hours on that day with over 3.75 lakh #SelfieWithDaughter tweets.
In ‘Mann Ki Baat’, he had stated that this idea will give thrust for ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padao’ initiative of the Centre to educate girls and to improve gender ratio in the country.
Shahrukh’s selfie tweet with British boy band One Direction’s former member Zayn Malik at the Asian Awards in London on April 18 was the ‘Golden Tweet for India’ in 2015.
According to the blog post, his tweet was viewed nearly 18.3 million times globally and recorded over 1.4 lakh re-tweets.