The World Leaders With The Most Twitter Influence [Infographic]

Online influence and offline influence are two very different things. Just because a person may be influential offline, it doesn’t mean they can command the attention of all their online followers and fans. That’s one of the aspects of social media that can be humbling. Take Twitter for example. Everyone starts at the same place and builds up, well, unless you are a world leader or celebrity of some sort. Let’s look at the Twitter influence of world leaders.

Twiplomacy recently released their Twiplomacy Study 2013. It’s a great read, and I highly recommend clicking over to check it out. Their research found that 77.7% of world leaders have a Twitter account. Barack Obama is the most followed world leader on Twitter with over 33.5 million followers. He also has the most retweeted tweet of all time, which was his Four More Years tweet (it has almost 800,000 retweets).

However, when we look at Twitter influence, Barack Obama is not number one. There is another world leader who ranks far above Obama when it comes to Twitter influence. As it turns out, the Pope’s English tweeting account (he has eight additional accounts) is the most retweeted Twitter account for a world leader. If the number of retweets is an indication of Twitter influence, the Pope would be number one.

This naturally brings us to the next question about all this. Which world leaders are tweeting for themselves, and which ones aren’t? Some of them do their own tweeting, but most of them don’t. This infographic called How World Leaders Connect On Twitter (by Twiplomacy) goes into more detail about all this. Like I mentioned, their corresponding blog post is fascinating.

It’s also interesting to note that most world leaders joined Twitter with an official account in 2010 or 2011. Barack Obama got on Twitter in 2007. Of these Twitter accounts, 405 are active, 79 are dormant, 17 are inactive (meaning they’ve never sent a tweet) and 4 are private (protected) accounts. Twitter influence is fascinating for so many reasons, and it’s interesting to see how some of these world leaders use it to their advantage.