President Uhuru Kenyatta remains Sub-Saharan Africa’s most followed leader on Twitter with three million followers.
A new study dubbed Twiplomacy by Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW), an international communications agency indicates that despite the recent Twitter purge, Uhuru is most followed in the Sub Sahara.
The purge saw Uhuru lose 16,071 of his followers.
Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari follow in second and third positions respectively with more than 1 million.
However, U.S. President Donald Trump is the most followed world leader on Twitter with 53 million followers.
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According to the study, the @realDonaldTrump account has lost roughly 320,000 followers, from 53.4 million to 53.1 million.
But the official presidential account, @POTUS, saw a lesser drop of about 60,000 followers.
Trump became the most followed world leader in October 2017 when he passed Pope Francis who is the second most followed world leader with more than 47 million followers on his nine language accounts.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi takes the third and fourth spots, with 42 million followers on his personal account and 26 million followers on his institutional account.
The official Twitter account of the U.S. President, @POTUS ranks fifth and @WhiteHouse ranks sixth, with 23 and 17 million followers, respectively.
As of May 2018, the heads of state and government and foreign ministers of 187 countries had a presence on Twitter, representing 97 per cent of all 193 UN member states.
The governments of only six countries, namely Laos, Mauritania, Nicaragua, North Korea, Swaziland and Turkmenistan do not have an official presence on the platform.
Facebook is the second-most popular network among government leaders, and it is where they have the biggest audience.
Instagram has become the third-most popular social network for governments, with 81 per cent of all UN member states having set up an account and many of them are sharing daily Instagram stories.
In a statement, Twitter announced that it would remove locked accounts from follower counts to increase credibility.
The social media platform said most people would see a change of followers and that larger follower counts would experience more significant drops.
The purge saw Twitter bigwigs like bloggers Cyprian Nyakundi and Christian Dela lose a big chunk of their followers.
Nyakundi's followers reduced from a whopping 1.2 million to 691,000 while Dela's numbers now stand at 517,000 from an impressive one million.
“Social media has become a primary conduit of diplomacy,” said BCW Chief Innovation Officer Chad Latz.
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