Communications impresarios Burston-Marsteller have today released their ‘Twiplomacy 2014’ report into how world leaders and organisations use social media to reach the public.
No doubt the product of many man hours spent scrolling through Twitter, the report reveals that more than half of the world’s foreign ministers and their institutions are active on the social networking site, with the most followed world leader being U.S. President Barack Obama with 43.7 million Twitter followers.
Far behind in second place is the Pope, on 14.1 million, and in third is the prime minister of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, with 5 million followers.
Britain’s prime minister David Cameron is in 13th place, behind Turkey’s Erdogan, who banned Twitter in his country earlier this year, and even Argentinian president Cristina Kirchner, who is in 10th place.
A new entry is India’s newly elected leader Narenda Modi, who comes in at 5th place with 4.967 million followers.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has seen the “most impressive growth” over the past year, multiplying his following 19 times over in one year alone. The foreign ministry of Ukraine saw its follower numbers multiplied by eleven, and the English-language account of Russian President Vladimir Putin almost quintupled.
But despite Barack Obama’s Twominance (Twitter dominance… I just made that up) in sheer numbers, his account, which is a campaign account and not affiliated with the office of the President of the United States – is not the most influential. That title belongs to Pope Francis. Twiplomacy’s authors note:
“…@BarackObama tweets are on average only retweeted 1,442 times. By this standard, Pope Francis @Pontifex is by far the most influential tweep with more than 10,000 retweets for every tweet he sends on his Spanish account and 6,462 retweets on average on his English account. Venezuela’s President @NicolasMaduro is in second position, receiving on average 2,065 retweets per tweet on his Spanish account.”
It was also noted that Spanish is the most frequently used language by Twiplomats, accounting for 32 percent of the tweets studied. English comes in second with 28 percent, and French is third of 7 percent.
British Prime Minister David Cameron’s most mentioned users in his own tweets are 1) Barack Obama, 2) Andy Murray, and 3) The Sun newspaper.
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