A recent study done by a leading PR and communications firm, Burson-Marsteller has found that US President Barack Obama and Indian PM Narendra Modi are the most liked leaders globally on Facebook.
Indian Prime Minister is the second most followed head of state with his personal page, ‘Facebook Narendra Modi’ having more than 31 million followers. He has 10.1 million fans on his institutional PMOIndia page as well.
Although Obama beats Modi in the number of likes, the latter has the most interactive fans, with more than 200 million interactions on his Facebook ‘community’ in 2015 (the total number of post likes, comments and shares), more than five times as many as Obama.
Obama has 46 million likes on his ‘BarackObama’ campaign page making him the most followed politician in the world. Turkish President RecepTayyip Erdogan, Indonesian President Joko Widodo and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi complete the top five of the most popular world leaders with more than 5 million likes each.
The study found that almost 90% of all governments have an official Facebook presence, with 87 heads of state, 82 heads of government and 51 foreign ministers maintaining personal pages on the platform.
The study also concluded that for 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, Chief Strategy Officer of the company.
“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,” he added.