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Trump still the world leader with the biggest Twitter exposure

Trump still the world leader with the biggest Twitter exposure

For the fourth year running, US President Donald Trump is the most followed world leader on Twitter, with 81.1 million followers on his @realDonaldTrump account which has grown by 33% year-over-year. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has moved up into second position with 57.9 million followers, ahead of Pope Francis who has 51 million followers on his nine different language accounts.

These finding were released this week in the 2020 Twiplomacy rankings by global communications agency BCW (Burson Cohn & Wolfe), represented in Namibia by Gys Reitz of Parrot Communications.

The heads of state and government of 163 countries and 132 foreign ministers maintain personal accounts on the platform. As of 01 June 2020, all 1089 personal and institutional Twitter accounts of world leaders had a combined total of more than 620 million followers.

President Trump is also the most effective world leader on Twitter, since each one of his tweets garners on average 24,000 retweets, which is slightly better than Saudi King Salman who garners 23,573 retweets per tweet. However, Indian Prime Minister Modi reaches on average 40 million followers, twice as many as President Trump who reaches about 20 million people per tweet.

According to the 2020 edition of Twiplomacy, the governments and leaders of 189 countries had an official presence on the social network, representing 98% of the 193 UN member states. The governments of only four countries do not have a Twitter presence, namely Laos, North Korea, Sao Tome and Principe and Turkmenistan.

Muhammadu Buhari, the President of Nigeria is by far the most followed Sub-Sahara African leader with 3,121,169 followers ahead of Paul Kagame the President of Rwanda with 1,910,159 followers. Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa has seen the biggest growth over the past year more than doubling his followers, reaching 1,386,849.


 

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