King 2nd most influential leader

RIYADH: Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman is the second-most influential leader on Twitter, right behind US President Barack Obama who ranks first. These were the findings of a survey conducted by Burson-Marsteller on May 31 and published on Twiplomacy, a site specializing in monitoring the accounts of leaders and officials. Saudi Arabia’s @KingSalman is in second place among the most re-tweeted world leaders. “He only tweets intermittently and mainly in Arabic without any visuals, but when he does his messages are amplified on average 9,986 times,” Twiplomacy stated. Obama was first with 12,350 re-tweets for his @POTUS account. In third place was Pope Francis with 9,905, fourth Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with 2,532, fifth Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir with 2,398, sixth Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with 1,602, seventh Obama’s personal account with 1,572, eighth Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with 1,298, ninth Indonesia President Joko Widodo with 1,224, and tenth Argentine President Mauricio Macri with 927. Twenty-two world leaders have seen some of their tweets re-tweeted more than 20,000 times, reflecting major announcements and historic events. Sad news often dominates the most re-tweeted tweets, such as the Malaysian Prime Minister’s tweet about the loss of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, and the tweets by French President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls after the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015. The site stated that Twitter is the social media channel of choice for governments and foreign ministries judging by the number of governments on the platform. Burson-Marsteller’s research team identified 793 Twitter accounts belonging to heads of state and government in 173 countries, representing 90 percent of all UN member states, with a combined audience of 324 million followers. Only 20 countries, mainly in the Pacific and Africa, do not have a Twitter presence. Even the Chinese government, known for blocking Western social media networks behind the “Great Firewall,” is slowly opening up to social media engagement and some of its diplomatic missions are actively engaging with peers on Twitter. Facebook is the second most popular network among government leaders and it is where they have the biggest audience. The heads of state and government and foreign ministers of 169 countries are present on the platform, representing 88 percent of all UN member states. The 537 Facebook pages have a combined audience of 255 million likes. On average, Facebook pages are more popular than Twitter accounts, with a median average of 31,000 likes per page, compared to 14,000 followers for each Twitter account. YouTube is the third-most used network among governments and 151 use it as a video repository, although the median average of subscribers is only 486. The photo-sharing network Instagram is the fourth-most popular social network and 71 percent of all UN member states have set up an account to share behind-the-scenes pictures of their activities. Google+ completes the Top Five list, with 129 governments present on the platform. However two-thirds of the 271 pages are either dormant or inactive and have on average only 59 followers. Despite their size, LinkedIn, Vine, Periscope and Snapchat are niche networks used by fewer than 40 percent of all UN member states. Courtesy: SaudiArab