About this Study
Twitter has become a new way to communicate with world leaders and a way for these leaders to communicate with each other. On the one hand it allows heads of state and government to broadcast their daily activities and government news to an ever-growing audience, on the other, it allows citizens direct access to their leaders. Anyone can @mention a world leader on Twitter. Whether the world leader answers is another question, although a select few do actually reply to their followers’ @mentions.
“Life is tweet”, former UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott recently wrote in the Guardian: “Twitter has given me a voice and a connection to millions of people that the distorted prism of the mainstream media denied.” Indeed, a few world leaders use Twitter precisely to debunk false information and correct media reports.
Two thirds of all world leaders on Twitter
Presidents, prime ministers or their institutions in 125 countries have a presence on Twitter. Twitter is especially popular in North and South America where 83% and 75% of the heads of state and government, respectively, have a Twitter account. Three-quarters of European governments are active on Twitter, while in Africa and Asia the number drops to 60% and 56% respectively. In Oceania governments in only 4 out of the 14 countries (i.e. 29% of leaders) have a Twitter presence.
Barack Obama is the most followed world leader with 17,115,077 followers, and the 5th most popular account in the Twitterverse just behind Britney Spears. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is the second most followed leader with 3,152,608 followers, followed by the White House (2,951,928), Queen Rania of Jordan (2,174,187) and the UK prime minister (2,022,685). Presidents Abdullah Gül of Turkey, Felipe Calderón of Mexico, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Cristina Fernandez of Argentina, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and prime ministers Dmitry Medvedev of Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey all have more than one million followers.
Barack Obama Superstar
More important than the number of followers are the connections between these world leaders. More than a quarter of all world leaders and governments (76) are following Barack Obama. However @BarackObama only mutually follows Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg and Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev, and hasn’t established mutual Twitter relations with other world leaders yet. Interestingly the White House doesn’t follow @BarackObama, which is a campaign account.
EU President Herman van Rompuy (@euHvR) is the best connected world leader, mutually following 11 other peers. Australia’s Prime Minister @JuliaGillard is the second best connected leader with 10 mutual connections, followed by the Korean presidency (@BlueHouseKorea), the UK government (@Number10gov) and the Russian prime minister (@MedvedevRussia), all of whom follow 9 other world leaders. Almost half of world leader accounts (120 of the 264) don’t follow any of their peers.
Twitter is sometimes used by small nations to put them on the world map and tweet eye-to-eye with their peers. The president of the Dominican Republic unilaterally follows 71 other world leaders. The president of Portugal and the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago both unilaterally follow more than 50 peers, perhaps in the hope that they will return the favour; so far they haven’t.
Russian President Putin, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Dutch Prime Minister Rutte and the Dutch Royal Household don’t follow any other Twitter user. In total 42 accounts do not follow any other Twitter user; effectively cutting themselves out of the conversation.
Are they tweeting themselves?
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Bien à vous,
@Morgane BRAVO
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