Almost 90% of all governments have an official Facebook presence, and 87 heads of state, 82 heads of government and 51 foreign ministers maintain personal pages on the platform, according to a new study by Burson-Marsteller, a leading global public relations and communications firm.
Based on data collected in January 2016, the World Leaders on Facebook study the first installment of the 2016 edition of Burson-Marsteller’s annual Twiplomacy study found that 169 of the 193 UN member states maintain an official Facebook page.
“This first study about governments’ use of Facebook provides valuable insights about the communications practices of political leaders around the world,” said Donald A. Baer, Worldwide Chair and CEO, Burson-Marsteller. “There is a great deal corporations, NGOs and other sectors can learn from the ways governments and their leaders use Facebook. By showing their human side, they are creating a closer relationship with their citizens.”
Over the past eight years, Facebook has become the platform of choice for world leaders and governments to engage with their voters and constituents. On 4 January 2016, all of the world leaders combined had accumulated a total of 230,489,257‘likes’ and had published a total of 302,456 posts.
“This study illustrates that governments are becoming savvier and more professional in the use of social media. An encouraging finding from this study is that, for governments,it seems that quality trumps quantity in terms of what they post,” said Jeremy Galbraith, CEO of Burson-Marsteller Europe, Middle East & Africa and Global Chief Strategy Officer. “It is also very refreshing to see that successful politicians on Facebook behave just like any other Facebook user, sharing pictures of their home life, holidays and their children.”
U.S. President Barack Obama is the most popular world leader on Facebook with 46 million likes on his Barack Obama campaign page. Obama is closely followed by Indian Prime Minister NarendraModi with more than 31 million fans on his personal NarendraModi page and 10.1 million fans on his institutional PMOIndia page, which is in third position. Turkish President RecepTayyipErdogan, IndonesianPresident JokoWidodo and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi complete the top five list of the most popular world leaders with more than 5 million likes each.
In November 2015, the US administration set up an official institutional page for the President of the United States (POTUS) which has since attracted 1.3 million likes in less than two months and is already among the 30 most popular pages of world leaders.
Modihas the most interactive fans, with more than 200 million interactions in his Facebook ‘community’ in 2015 (the total number of post likes, comments and shares), more than five times as many as Obama. However,the White House’s posts, while attracting far fewer likes than Modi, are nevertheless shared more frequently. Argentina’s new President,Mauricio Macri,is the most engaged world leader and has become the undisputed ‘Facebook president’ with a double digit engagement rate relative to the number of page likes of almost 12%.
The Facebook page of the Presidency of the Dominican Republic is the most prolific page, with an average of more than 27 posts per day in 2015. Almost as prolific are the governments of Botswana and the Philippines, each with an average of more than 20 posts per day. By contrast, the official POTUS page only publishes intermittently,but gathers more than 77,000 interactions per post.