Twitter most preferred social media platform of world leaders

MANILA, Philippines – Despite stalling user growth and losing the popularity game to Snapchat, Twitter remains the social media platform of choice of many world leaders, governments, and foreign ministries.

Twiplomacy, a study conducted by Burson-Marsteller, is an annual survey of world leaders on social media. This year’s report identified 793 accounts belonging to heads of state and government in 173 countries – 90% of all UN member-states.

Facebook follows closely as the second most popular social media platform.

Twiplomacy identified 537 Facebook pages of world leaders, governments, and foreign ministries belonging to 169 countries on the platform. Despite being number two, however, Facebook is where these accounts have the biggest audience. According to the study, Facebook pages are usually more popular with a median average of 31,000 likes per page.

Youtube and Instagram are the third and fourth most used platforms.

Most followed and most influential accounts

Outgoing US President Barack Obama (@BarackObama) is the most followed world leader this year with 75 million followers. According to Twiplomacy, he also leads the rankings on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google+ with his campaign accounts.

His social media savvy administration has pioneered digital diplomacy in the US and has since then set up accounts for @whitehouse, @FLOTUS, @VP, and @POTUS.

Obama is followed by the Pope (@Pontifex) and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (@NarendraModi) in the rankings for top world leader accounts with the most followers on Twitter.

In terms of influence, Obama remains at the top spot but this time, it’s his Twitter account that comes with the office (@POTUS) instead of his personal one (@BarackObama) which gets the most number of retweets.

The study shows that Obama’s @POTUS receives an average of over 12,000 retweets followed by Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and the Pope’s Spanish account (@pontifex_es) with over 9,000 retweets.

Twiplomatic relations

It’s the job of foreign ministries and diplomats to establish and maintain diplomatic relations. The same is being done as well on the Twittersphere.

According to the study, the European Union’s (EU) External Action Service (@EU_eeas), its diplomatic corps and foreign ministry, is the best-connected foreign service. Its Twitter account mutually follows 122 foreign ministries and world leaders followed by the English account of the foreign ministry of Russia (@MFA_Russia). – Rappler.com