Quite a few African leaders seem to use Twitter solely to converse with their followers. Rwanda’s President @PaulKagame is the most conversational world leader with 79 percent of his tweets being @replies to other Twitter users, according to Twiplomacy Study of 2017. The Study says “@PaulKagame sometimes gets into memorable Twitter exchanges with his critics, even sometimes chats publicly with his children.”
Twiplomacy refers to the use of Twitter and other social media sites by government agencies and officials to engage with the public, disperse information and even leverage global influence.
The Twiplomacy report also says President Kagame’s personal Twitter engagement shows that, “even if you have 1.6 million Twitter followers, you can still be on top of the conversation and personally reply to comments on your Twitter feed.”
Rwanda’s Prime Minister Anastase Murekezi is in fifth position, occasionally holding Twitter chats with the hashtag #TalkToPMRwanda and half of the 2,219 tweets of Rwanda’s Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo are also direct replies to questions from followers.
About the Study
Twiplomacy is the pre-eminent global study of world leaders on social media, conducted by leading strategic communications and global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller.
Burson-Marsteller identified 856 Twitter accounts of heads of state and government, foreign ministers, and their institutions in 178 countries worldwide. The study analyzes each leader’s Twitter profiles, tweet history and their connections with each other.
Data was collected on May 22, 2017 using Burson-Marsteller’s proprietary Burson Tools to analyze the 731,880 possible Twitter connections between world leaders. Other variables considered included: tweets, following, followers, the date the user joined Twitter, tweets/day, retweets, percent of retweets, @replies, percent of @replies, tweets retweeted, average number of tweets retweeted.
Full report HERE
