PM Imran ninth most-followed world leader

Prime Minister Imran Khan has become the ninth most popular global leader on the microblogging site Twitter, registering a 22 percent increase in the number of his followers on the official account, a Twiplomacy survey showed on Tuesday.

A 2020 study by Burson Cohn & Wolfe — BCW), a public relations and communications firm, focused on the tweets of world leaders during the coronavirus pandemic, tracking their reach and the overall flow of accurate information.

The report found that the heads of state and government of 163 countries and 132 foreign Ministers maintain personal Twitter accounts. “As of June 1, 2020, all 1,089 personal and institutional pages of world leaders on Facebook had a total of more than 620 million subscribers and have posted 8.7 million tweets since their creation,” the report said.

US President Donald trump was voted the most consistent global leader with more than 81 million followers, while Indian Prime Minister Narendra modi came in second place, ahead of Pope Francis, who has 51 million followers on his nine different language accounts.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took seventh place, gaining 16.1 million subscribers and recording a 17% increase.

In terms of effectiveness, the US President again came out ahead, but king Salman bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia took the second position, scoring an average of 23,573 retweets.

Erdogan was in fifth position in this category, with an average of 4,879 retweets.

On the other hand, in terms of coverage, Prime Minister Imran managed to take the fourth position, with true coverage estimated at 7.5 million people or 64% of his 12.1 million followers.

Trump was in second place with 20.3 million people or 25% of his 83.8 million followers, while Erdogan was in eighth place with 5.2 million people or 33% of his 16.4 million followers.

The report also indicated that governments and leaders of 189 countries have an official presence on the social network, which is 98 percent of the 193 UN member States.

According to the report, Pakistan's Shah Mehmood Qureshi is the second most popular foreign Minister after recording a 29 percent increase in his Twitter feed with 3.1 million followers.

Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan of the UAE topped the list with 4.6 million subscribers, while US Secretary of state Mike Pompeo and Iran's Javad Zarif also made the list with 1.9 and 1.5 million subscribers, respectively.