New Indian Prime Minister overtakes White House in Twitter followers
View(s):Geneva – Since his election in late May, India’s new Prime Minister NarendraModi (@NarendraModi) has become the fourth-most followed world leader on Twitter, with 4,981,777 followers.
He surpassed the United States White House account, @WhiteHouse (4,980,207), this week and is using Twitter as a power tool to broadcast his messages, according to Twiplomacy, an annual global study of world leaders on Twitter by Burson-Marsteller, a leading global public relations and communications firm. Released this week, the study also revealed that more than 83 per cent of all United Nations (UN) governments have a presence on Twitter, and two-thirds (68 per cent) of all heads of state and government have personal Twitter accounts.
Twiplomacy aims to identify the extent to which world leaders use Twitter and how they connect on the social network. In early June 2014, Burson-Marsteller analyzed 643 government accounts in 161 countries. Only 32 countries, mainly in Africa and Asia-Pacific, do not have any Twitter presence.
“We are proud that, now in its third year, the Burson-MarstellerTwiplomacy study has become a must-read on social media’s growing importance among world leaders,” said Donald A. Baer, Worldwide Chair and CEO, Burson-Marsteller. “This year we have seen a 28 percent rise in Twitter accounts among government users, a dramatic increase in efforts to reach people around the world.”
As of 25 June 2014, the five most followed world leaders were U.S. President Barack Obama (@BarackObama) (43 million followers of the U.S. president’s campaign account), Pope Francis (@Pontifex) (14 million followers on his nine different language accounts), Indonesia’s President SusiloBambangYudhoyono (@SBYudhoyono) (5 million followers), @NarendraModi and the @WhiteHouse. However, the most followed world leaders follow few other peers, and they are hardly conversational. @BarackObama and the @WhiteHouse only follow three other world leaders, namely Norway’s Erna Solberg, Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev and the UK government.
Pope Francis (@Pontifex) is the most influential world leader on Twitter. His Spanish tweets are retweeted on average more than 10,000 times each. The tweets of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro are retweeted 2,000 times. In comparison, @BarackObama’s tweets are only retweeted an average 1,400 times each, despite his massive following.