South African president Jacob Zuma’s Twitter account hasn’t been active for months now (with the last tweet posted on the 6th of October last year), yet he remains the third most followed president in Africa according to the 2014 Twiplomacy Study.
The Twiplomacy Study is conducted every year to analyse the Twitter profiles, tweet history, and connections of 643 Twitter accounts of heads of state and government, foreign ministers and their institutions in 161 countries worldwide.
Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta tops the most followed African leader list with 457 307 followers, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame comes in at number two with 407 515 and Jacob Zuma’s 325 876 followers earned him the number three spot.
These numbers are only a fraction of the total followership of the world’s most followed leaders though. US president Barack Obama has a whopping 43.7 million followers, Pope Francis has 14.1 million followers across all his nine different language accounts and Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has just over five million followers.
But do these numbers equal influence and reach on the social network? Not at all, according to Twiplomacy. As big as the gap between Obama’s and the Pope’s followership is, Pope Francis’ account enjoys more reach and influence among followers 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; Obama’s tweets, meanwhile, are only retweeted 1 442 times on average.
Our own president’s account, despite having a lot of followers is likewise not particularly influential on Twitter. But in his case, it’s likely because he hasn’t tweeted since October of last year. He still gets his share of mentions when his own actions and local politics are in the spotlight, though.
You can read the full list of the world’s most followed leaders on the Twiplomacy site and also on interesting findings such as whether or not world leaders are actually tweeting from their accounts, how conversational they are and which accounts are the most active.
[Source – Twiplomacy, Image – Twitter]
