Twiplomacy study ranks sub-Sahara African leaders’ facebook activity
Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta is the most popular leader on facebook in sub-Sahara Africa with 3.6 million likes, followed by his Ghanaian counterpart, President Nana Akufo-Addo with 1.6 million likes.
Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Cameroon’s Paul Biya and Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari complete the top five African list, ranging between 761,000 and 65,000 likes.
The Facebook page of the Government of Botswana is the most prolific with an average of 37 posts per day.
These startling findings come from the latest World Leaders on Facebook study, released this week by international communications conglomerate Burson Cohn Wolfe. The study is part of their Twiplomacy series.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is by far the most popular world leader on Facebook, with more than 43.5 million likes on his personal page and 13.7 million likes on his institutional Prime Minister of India page.
US President Donald Trump is in second place, with more than 23 million likes on his personal Facebook page and Jordan’s Queen Rania is in third position with 16.9 million likes, reaching an Arabic and English audience well beyond the 5.8 million Facebook users in Jordan.
However, Brazil’s new President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office on January 1, 2019, has dominated the rankings of World Leaders on Facebook over the past 12 months, taking the top spot in terms of interactions. His Facebook page has registered more than 145 million interactions, almost twice as many as President Trump’s, who had only 84 million total interactions from two and a half times as many followers.
The study, using aggregate data from Facebook’s CrowdTangle tool, analyzed the activity of 962 Facebook pages of heads of state and government and foreign ministers, fifty more than in the 2017 study. As of 01 March 2019, for the preceding 12 months, these pages have a combined total of 345 million page likes and published 449,739 posts which have generated a total of 767 million interactions (comments, likes and shares).
Burson Cohn Wolfe is represented in Namibia by Gys Reitz of Parrot Communications.
