IDG News Service - There were 123 heads of state and governments using Twitter to communicate with citizens and the rest of the world as of December 2012, a think tank said Tuesday.
The number is up 78 percent on 2011, according to a study released on Tuesday by the Digital Policy Council (DPC), an international think thank that has been tracking governments' Twitter activity since 2009. Of the 123 tweeting heads of state, 32 were represented by government accounts that use Twitter on behalf of the head of state, the DPC said.
While the United Nations has 193 member states, the DPC only studied Twitter use in 164. It monitored countries with a population of over 500,000, the same ones included in the Polity IV dataset of political regimes tracked by the U.S. government's Political Instability Task Force. DPC chose that dataset because it wanted to compare politically stable countries, said Omar Hijazi, managing partner of Digital Daya, of which the DPC is the research and public advocacy arm.
U.S. president Barack Obama (@BarackObama) was the most-followed head of state, with 24.6 million followers. He added 15 million followers in 2012, according to the study. His account, mainly managed by his staff and sometimes used by the president himself, broke a Twitter record when his election victory Twitter message, "Four more years", became the most retweeted Twitter message of all time, according to Twitter.
The second most-followed head of state on Twitter is president Hugo ChA!vez (@chavezcandanga) of Venezuela, with over 3.8 million followers. ChA!vez mainly used Twitter for communicating with his electorate when he found himself fighting an election campaign from his sick bed in Cuba, using the social network to challenge his opponent and fighting the rumors about his health, the DPC said.
President Abdullah GA1/4l (@cbabdullahgul) of Turkey ranked third. He tweets mainly in Turkish and gained over 2 million followers in 2012, reaching a total of over 2.5 million.
The most-followed woman on the list is Queen Rania Al Abdullah (@QueenRania), who as a queen consort of King Abdullah II of Jordan is not a head of state herself. She is included in the list though, because she used her account as a political channel to represent the viewpoints of the king in the past, Hijazi said. And although her political messages have dwindled, her tweets are still "very much related to the policies of the head of state," he added.
Her account gained over a million followers in 2012, reaching a total of almost 2.5 million. She describes herself as "a mum and a wife with a really cool day job" in her Twitter profile.
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