Introduction: In an electronic democracy, politicians avoid being solely dependent on traditional communication channels like news media. Social media acts a political communication tool and Uses Gratification (UG) theory explains how people use media for their needs. Therefore, the attempt has been made to analyze the information shared on these social media platforms by political parties to communicate has any effect on communication needs according to Uses Gratification theory.

Methods: Content analysis was employed to achieve the objectives using R software, where in data was acquired from social media platforms of major political parties of India and the coding was developed to classify the extracted data into communication needs as per UG theory.

Findings: The content analysis shows that among all parties, BJP has higher visibility and consistency on Twitter and Instagram, satisfying cognitive needs. Most parties satisfy affective needs on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. However, YouTube content is less satisfying for personal integrative, social integrative, and tension released needs.

Originality: The current study tried to use innovative methods or combining methods in a new way. It provided new insights or implications that have not been extensively discussed. Therefore, Political parties should focus on specific social media for interactive and efficient information spread.

The pandemic made it critical for political leaders to intensify measures in fight against Covid-19 and one such measure was building trust among public through communication. With exponential growth in reach of social media, while state political leaders have progressively used internet for election campaigns, limited studies have explored as to how leaders use this medium to communicate during crisis, what kind of information do they share and what are common issues addressed. This paper, using qualitative research design, analyses Indian political leaders communication on Twitter. Sentiment Analysis was carried to identify and extract subjective information in leaders communication using 29 Indian political leaders, where in 12.128 tweets were extracted. Subjectivity scores depicted more than half of leaders had shared fact-based information, and Polarity scores indicated that almost 90% of leaders shared positive or neutral information thus leading to an inference that leaders share more of facts based and positive or neutral information rather than statements in form of opinions.