The G8 is wrapping up here today in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland. When the leaders are apart from each other, will they use Twitter to stay in touch? Some do. Some don’t. And if you want to reach German Chancellor Angela Merkel, better use the phone. Here’s the Twitter Scorecard:
Number of Followers
- U.S. President Barack Obama: 32,868,686
- France President François Hollande: 552,303
- Canada Prime Minister Stephen Harper: 343,372
- UK Prime Minister David Cameron: 342,055
- Russia President Vladimir Putin: 163,486*
- Italy Prime Minister: Enrico Letta: 137,596
German reporters here at the G8 media centre indicated that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief spokesperson tweets but the Chancellor does not have an official account. There is a Twitter account Angela_Merkel that looks official but is not an “approved” account.
I could find no evidence that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has a Twitter account. Happy to be enlightened on that score if he does.
Who’s Following Most?
- Obama: 9,288
- Letta: 1,896
- Hollande: 1,653
- Harper: 210
- Cameron: 192
- Putin: 1
Number of Tweets:
- Obama: 661,547
- Hollande: 4,330
- Letta: 1,469
- Harper: 1,241
- Putin: 981
- Cameron: 196
Who follows who?
- Obama follows: None of his G8 peers
- Harper follows: None of his G8 peers
- Letta follows: Obama, Hollande, Cameron
- Cameron follows: Obama, Letta
- Putin follows: Putin
- Hollande follows: Obama
*Vladimir Putin’s English Language Twitter account is @PutinRF_Eng. That account is followed by 16,198.
(Scorecard numbers taken at about 0600 ET on TUE JUN 18, 2013)
@abeshinzo is Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s account.
I realize you’re just having a bit of fun here, but even for fun it would be nice to have some perspective on the numbers.
For example, some 50% of the 500 million Twitter account holders in existence are in the U.S., whereas something like 1.75% or less of Twitter users are in France (~8.5 million twits). If we imagine that most of Hollande’s followers are in France, and most of Obama’s followers are in the U.S., then Hollande’s got an audience of some 6.5% of French twits, while Obama has some 13% of American twits (and he likely has more foreign followers than Hollande, so there’s that) … In other words, Obama is only roughly twice as interesting to young people than is Hollande, despite having something like 60 times as many followers in raw numbers.
🙂 See, still fun.
*Caveat that I ran these numbers quickly and admit they may be flawed.
[I don’t know if I can include links here, but my sources for Twitter numbers are:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/9945505/Twitter-in-numbers.html
http://www.beevolve.com/twitter-statistics/%5D