Uhuru leading African pack in Twitter following
President Uhuru Kenyatta is the most followed leader on Twitter in Sub-Saharan Africa.
This is according to the 2018 Twiplomacy Study released by global communications agency Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW).
Mr Kenyatta’s handle @UKenyatta has a following of 3 million, beating Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari (@MBuhari) which has a following of 1.5 million and Rwanda president Paul Kagame’s @PaulKagame with 1.2 million followers.
However, US president Donald Trump holds the top spot as the most followed world leader on Twitter with 52 million followers on his @realDonaldTrump account and the most Interactions in the last 12 Months.
DONALD TRUMP
Mr Trump’s followers have more than doubled since he ascended to office on January 20, 2017.
He took the top spot in October 2017 beating Pope Francis (@Pontifex) to the second position with more than 47 million followers on his nine language accounts.
Indian Prime Minister @NarendraModi takes the third and fourth places with 42 million followers on his personal account and 26 million others on his institutional account, @PMOIndia.
The official Twitter account of the US President, @POTUS, is ranked fifth and @WhiteHouse sixth, with 23 and 17 million followers, respectively.
According to the study done in May 2018, the heads of state and government and foreign ministers of 187 countries had a presence on Twitter, representing 97 percent of all 193 UN member states.
It also showed that governments of only six countries, that is Laos, Mauritania, Nicaragua, North Korea, Swaziland and Turkmenistan do not have an official presence on the social media platform.
FACEBOOK POPULARITY
Facebook is the second-most popular network for government leaders, where they have the biggest audience, Instagram is third, with 81 percent of all UN member states having set up accounts.
A previous study released by the same agency in May 2018 indicated President Kenyatta was the second most followed leader in Africa on Facebook while Indian PM Narendra Modi led in the world.
The BCW Twiplomacy study analyzed activities of 951 Twitter accounts of heads of state and government and foreign ministers from May 19, 2017 to May 18, 2018 using aggregate data from Crowdtangle.com.