The majority of the world leaders use Twitter, says “Twiplomacy” study

The governments of almost two-thirds of the 193 UN-member countries are present on Twitter, while 45 percent of the 264 accounts analyzed are personal accounts of heads of state and government. Out of these just 30 world leaders tweet themselves and very few on a regular basis, revealed the “Twiplomacy” study, which is described by the PR firm Burson-Marsteller as the first-ever global study of world leaders on Twitter.

The study shows that while the social network invites direct interaction between users, few world leaders take advantage of this opportunity to develop connections. Almost half of world leader accounts analyzed don’t follow any of their peers. A quarter of world leaders and governments follow President Barack Obama and the White House, but @BarackObama and the @WhiteHouse have established mutual Twitter relations with only three other world leaders: Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg (@jensstoltenberg), the UK Prime Minister David Cameron (@Number10gov) and Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE).

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (@chavezcandanga) is the second most followed leader with 3,253,669 followers, followed by the White House (2,992,767), Queen Rania of Jordan (@QueenRania) with 2,213,832 and the UK prime minister (2,022,685).

Some 264 world leaders now have a Twitter account, and researchers believe that 30 of them do their own tweeting. Altogether they have sent more than 350,000 tweets to almost 52 million followers, the study shows.

World leaders tweet in 43 languages, with English favored by 90 of the accounts. Spanish is the next most-used, with 41 accounts, French is third with 25 accounts and Arabic fourth with 17 accounts.