Last few years have seen the immense growth of social media and microblogging platforms and its impact on communication and public conversation in the society related to politics. These platforms have shown the potential for political parties in public participation and spread information and to get political opinions from the people related to politicians, political parties, political foundations and their activities.
Recent studies have shown that there is an emerging need for political institutions to collect, analyze, monitor, visualize and summarize politically related information from social media platforms. This collection of social media analytics is a daunting task for political parties to implement because of the complexity of the information’s available on different social media platforms.
Today, with the widespread use of Internet and open conversation between the users the traditional public communications which have been initiated and managed by politicians have changed. Now politicians, political parties, and political institutions are using Social media listening tool for political communication to raise support, spread their message and connect with voters.
The first strategy of political communication is to identify the key message of the campaign which is then sent through offline and online Medias to create awareness in the mind of voters. Social media acts as a bridge between the political parties and the voters through interaction with social media channels which encourage the voters to spread the message. The bottom line is traditional Medias creates the conversation and social media amplifies and sustain it.
To get a vote, building a personal rapport with the voter has become an essential part of political campaigns. Now voters want to be heard, and social media platforms help them to say their opinions and share things which are relevant to them. Ready availability of tools have made Social media listening for political communication much easier and run your political campaign successfully.
Some of the tools used are social listening tool and Google alerts to find out what voters are talking about them in social media channels, blogs, and community forums. Measuring and analyzing the results of your political campaign is an essential foe long term success. These social listening tools help the political parties to understand the reaction of the voter and which message is relevant to them.

Nice post. Thanks for sharing
tried to share on pinterest and image “is not valid image” so pinterest failed…
the need for monitoring tools in order to engage appropriately is valid point