These are the Facebook Leaders
On February 1, 2017, the Indian Prime Minister's institutional page, PMO India, was in third place with 13 million "likes", followed by Queen Rania of Jordan in fourth place with 10 million followers. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan completes the top five with 8 million "likes." The study also documents the activity of the 590 Facebook accounts of heads of state and government as well as foreign ministers in the past year. The analysis is based on data collected by the Facebook Crowdtangle tool, according to which the Facebook account of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also had the most interactions (likes, comments and shared content) in 2016 compared to all other accounts of leading politicians. With 169 million interactions, Modi's activity far exceeds that of the runner-up, the Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, with 58 million interactions. The now archived account @ObamaWhiteHouse is in third place with 36 million interactions, followed by Argentinian President Mauricio Macri with just under 36 million. The personal page of former US President Barack Obama completes the top five list with 30 million interactions in the past year. It is interesting to note that Barack Obama, who was recently the politician with the most Facebook followers with 52 million "likes", has one of the lowest interaction rates with 0.15 percent. In contrast, Albanian President Bujar Nishani leads this measurement with a value of 10.79 percent, while almost 90 percent of national governments have an official Facebook account. According to the study, 87 heads of state, 70 heads of government and 55 foreign ministers also have a personal page on the social platform. The data collected in February 2017 shows that, compared to the previous year, 169 of the 193 UN member states still have an official Facebook page. "The second edition of the Burson-Marsteller Study World Leaders on Facebook illustrates how effective political communication is on this platform," says Don Bear, global chair and CEO of Burson-Marsteller. "It's exciting to see if business leaders will take a lesson from political leaders and how they use Facebook, such as how to bring a personal touch to communications."Donald Trump brings 20 million followers to the White HouseOn the day of his inauguration, January 20, 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump's Facebook account had 20 million followers, which is not only by far the highest number of any recently inaugurated president, but also a four-fold increase over 2016. His Facebook posts resulted in 290 million interactions last year, including 33 million shares and 30 million comments.Facebook is now one of the most important platforms for political leaders and governments to interact with their constituents, citizens and other key audiences. On February 1, 2017, all those in power had a combined Facebook reach of 311,093,076 users. Last year, a total of 398,982 posts were made, which generated 772,441,676 interactions. Although more than half of the posts made contain images, the results of the study show that video posts generate the most interactions: 4,847 on average. In contrast, photo posts only generated 2,935 interactions. The 47,739 videos posted on the pages of leading politicians were viewed a total of 2.5 billion times. "Over the past year, we have seen how much influence social media can have on political decisions worldwide," says Jeremy Galbraith, CEO of Burson-Marsteller Europe, Middle East & Africa and Global Chief Strategy Officer. "As the world's largest social network, Facebook has enormous power and influence, which political leaders know all too well. "With an average of 29 posts per day and over 10,000 posts in total throughout 2016, the Ethiopian government's Facebook page is the most active. It is closely followed by the Botswana government with an average of 28 posts per day and the government of Honduras with 23 posts per day.Other key findings of the study:- The most visited institution is the White House, with 4 million check-ins, followed by the Ugandan State House with 35,000 and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Thailand, also with 35,000 check-ins.- The White House is the page followed by the most peer institutions and individuals. With 26 direct connections, the White House is ahead of the European Commission in second place with 20 connections and the European Union in third place with 19 connections. The pages followed by political leaders include the United Nations (with 39 "likes"), followed by the European Parliament (with 25 "likes") and NATO (with 19 "likes").- The governments, institutions and heads of state of 24 United Nations member states are not active on Facebook, one state less than in the 2015 study.- British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and the British Foreign Office are the only two official government pages that follow Donald Trump's new POTUS account. The Russian Foreign Minister's page is the only official government page that Donald Trump has directly "liked".
