With less than a week left to drum up their support, a large number of candidates vying for the elections to Panjab University Students Council have taken a shine to social networking websites and have been sending out ‘friendship’ requests as well as inviting University students on the websites to ‘like’ their fan pages.

Students Organization of Panjab University (SOPU) leader Abhishek Guleria said that his party had appointed a few of its members as social media coordinators and they had been entrusted with the task of regularly updating the social media with poll campaign details as well as replying to queries from interested students. The coordinators are sending out regular messages to PU students to join their poll campaigns as well as bring in their friends to help the cause of student parties for the elections, which are scheduled for September 4.

He said, “In this day and age it is absolutely necessary to be visible on social networking and update members on the goings-on in the party. No elections can be won without the use of social media and that is the reason why we have hired laptops as well as tablet computers to help our poll campaign team reach out to more and more students.”

Prabhpreet Singh, party president of Student Federation of India (SFI), said that nowadays the elections were being contested on two levels, one being the physical world and the other being the virtual world. “From organizing meetings to publishing the poll rally schedule, everything can be done with a click of a mouse and that is why more and more student party leaders are investing time and energy in reaching out to students on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter,” he said.