The pope has more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter… kinda

If you’re procrastinating today, I suggest you head over to the pope’s Twitter account and watch his follower count swell. Despite the fact that he only sent out his first tweets today, pope Benedict XVI already has more than 1.3-million followers on Twitter.

Ok, so that’s technically not true (yet), as he ‘only’ has around 800 000 followers of his official English Twitter account at the moment, but if you combine the followers from that account with his seven other official accounts, you’ll hit the millions. While there may obviously be some overlap between followers of his multiple accounts, it’s still impressive considering he’s only tweeted five times so far.

The English account has by far the largest following — although it was started on February 23 this year, it only became active a few hours ago. His eight official accounts mimic each others tweets in various languages, from Arabic to Polish, French and German, with the Spanish account garnering the second largest amount of followers.

The pope’s first tweet has already gained more than 38 000 retweets and was sent from an iPad at a press event at the Vatican:

Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.

— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) December 12, 2012

From now onwards though, it seem the tweets will be sent by the Vatican’s social media team, although the pope will have some say over what they post and approve everything before it’s sent out.