War of tweets over demonetising
A war of tweets had recently broke-out between Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s chief minister and Paytm’s founder and CEO, Vijay Shekhar Sharma .
After the advertisements surfaced where the letter had congratulated Prime Minister Narendra Modi for demonetising Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes — a move that will be further benefiting Paytm as people would now choose mobile wallets till fresh currency notes are issued.
In this war of tweets, Kejriwal had tweeted, a hint at the probable prearrangement between the Modi government and Paytm: “Paytm is one of the biggest beneficiary of PM’s announcement. Next day PM appears in its ads. What is the deal Mr. PM?”
Then in return Sharma replied that. “Dear Sir, the biggest beneficiary is our country. We are just a tech startup, who is trying to solve financial inclusion and also trying to make India proud,” he tweeted.
After Sharma’s this tweet, Kejriwal had deleted his comment.
Reaction on war of tweets
But by then this war of tweets had made their impact. Kejriwal’s tweeted was retweeted more than 10,000 times and was also liked by over 3,000 people. Sharma’s got retweeted of about 8,000 times and had similar number of likes.
Meanwhile, during this war of tweets, there was a surge in Paytm’s usage.
According to data from the company, after days when this demonetization happened, Paytm’s traffic have grown seven times, app downloads has also increased three times, people added 30% more money to their wallets on Thursday (the first day increase was almost 10 times over normal days).
Online transactions have further increased three times, and offline (payment to retailers) grew five times. Paytm’s transaction value continued to grow 200% every day for the past couple of days.
Some of the other Twitter users have replied to Kejriwal, tweeting that there were many companies which had benefited from the odd-even drive. “Uber was the biggest beneficiary of the odd-even scheme. Was there a deal there, too @ArvindKejriwal?” read a tweet.
But Kejriwal did not stop at that. A while later, in reply to someone’s tweet with the picture of the ad, he tweeted, “Utterly shameful. Do people want their PM to model for pvt cos? Tomo, if these companies do wrongdoings, who will act against them.”
But, no there was no reaction from Sharma on that one, yet.
