Rwanda’s Paul Kagame is still the most Twitter-savvy African leader, according to the Twiplomacy Study of 2015 which analyses the Twitter activities and accounts of world leaders and their governments.

Twiplomacy collected data from the accounts of 669 world leaders and governments on the 24th of March using the Twitter analytics tool Twitonomy and looked at more than 60 variables such as number of tweets, following, followers, listed, the date the user joined Twitter, ratio followers/following, ratio listed/100 followers, tweets/day etc.

Kagame (@PaulKagame) has 842 260 followers and is also the world’s most conversational leader with 86% of his tweets being replies to other Twitter users. Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta (@UKenyatta) is the second most followed African leader with 781 929 followers.

Although 80% of African leaders have a Twitter account, not all are active. For example, our own President Jacob Zuma last tweeted on the 6th October 2013 (thanks to Zane Sequeira for spotting our mistake there) left 16 months between his last two tweets.

Promoting a caring society as a guest of the Evangelical… in Giyani, Limpopo

— Jacob G. Zuma (@SAPresident) October 6, 2013</>

@PresidencyZA thanks to all those who sent constructive suggestions on issues to address for #SONA2015

— Jacob G. Zuma (@SAPresident) February 12, 2015

On the other hand however, the @PresidencyZA account, which is very much active, is listed as the second most influential account after Kenyatta’s. Globally, Barack Obama (@BarackObama) and Pope Francis (@Pontifex) also maintain their positions as the top and second most followed leaders respectively (Obama at 56.9 million followers, the Pope at 19.5 million across all his nine language accounts). Collectively, all the world’s leaders have a combined follower tally of 212 million and have sent 2.6 million tweets since Obama became the first president to have an account back in 2007. You can check out more stats on the Twiplomacy blog. [Source – Twiplomacy, Image – CC 2.0 by Esther Vargas]