Rest of world’s leaders have nothing on Obama, Modi’s Facebook game

Facebook is playing an increasingly important role in the global political landscape, with nearly 90% of the world’s governments maintaining some kind of presence on the social network. And if international relations were a popularity contest, then US president Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would come out on top.

That’s according to a new study by PR firm Burson-Marsteller, which also reveals that 87 heads of state, 82 heads of government and 51 foreign ministers maintain personal pages on the platform.

The study shows that, 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.

The governments of only 24 countries have not yet established a presence on Facebook, including China, where the social network is banned and Switzerland, where the former president briefly set up a personal page in 2013 before deactivating it four months later.

Leading the pack is Obama, who has 46-million likes on his Barack Obama campaign page. Obama is closely followed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with more than 31-million fans on his personal Narendra Modi page and 10.1-million fans on his institutional PMO India page, which is in third position. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Indonesian President Joko Widodo 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.

Barack Obama’s Facebook page has more ‘likes’ than any other world leader

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.

Modi has 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.

Interestingly, despite not featuring on the most liked pages, the South African presidency ranks fairly highly when it comes to online check-ins:

Argentina’s new President, Mauricio Macri, is the most engaged world leader and, according to Burson-Marsteller, 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.

From a regional perspective, Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta is the most popular leader in Sub-Saharan Africa, with 2-million likes ahead of John Dramani Mahama, the President of Ghana and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the foreign minister of Ethiopia, each with more than 600 000 likes.

The region still has some what to go however when it comes to catching up with Asia. Aside from India Facebook has been making inroads in other Asian countries and has become the platform of choice for Asian leaders. Philippine President Noynoy Aquino, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak, Myanmar’s new leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen have all got sizeable audiences, with more than 1-million followers each.