Gandhinagar mayor gets FB likes from Turkey

AHMEDABAD: For the record, it’s not only Congress biggies like Ajay Maken and Digvijaya Singh who enjoy a strong ‘fan following’ in Turkey. Gandhinagar mayor Mahendrasinh Rana, who recently shifted loyalties to the BJP, also has a huge fan base in Istanbul with more than 50,000 ‘likes’ on his Facebook page from Turkey’s capital city. But one may ask, how come the Gandhinagar mayor has a fan base in that city larger than Istanbul mayor Kadir Topbas’ who has just 411 likes and six people talking about his Facebook page?
Rana started his Facebook account, ‘Mayor of Gandhinagar Mahendrasinh Rana’, in June this year and has already garnered 50,274 likes with 10,235 people talking about it.Almost 90% of Rana’s ‘likes’ were garnered in the early weeks of July, after which they declined in August. Rana also maintains another page on Facebook which is believed to be his personal page. Mahendrasinh Rana could not be contacted on phone for his comments, despite several attempts.
Last month, 34% of Maken’s 99,154 likes were from Istanbul and 24 per cent from Russia. In the case of Digvijay Singh, out of 4,636 likes garnered by his Facebook page last month, nearly 53.7% were acquired from Istanbul. “There are many websites where one can buy ‘likes’ on Facebook and ‘followers’ on Twitter. These firms are called ‘third parties’ in social media terminology, who open email accounts in huge numbers and use them to create Facebook and Twitter accounts. Every like on FB page costs a little less than Rs 4,” said Parthesh Patel, who handles some pages of Gujarat Congress.