“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 channel of choice for community engagement with world leaders. Many politicians discover social media channels during election campaigns, such as the Barack Obama page, which was set up in late 2007 as an electoral tool for the former Senator of Illinois. Since then, a Facebook presence has become part and parcel of any social media political campaign and one of the best ways to engage with potential voters and citizens.
According to Facebook’s latest figures, 1.5 billion people have registered an account on the platform, of which 1 billion people are active on the social network every day. In 2015, the number of users on Facebook has become even greater than the population of China, the most populous country on earth.
Given this global audience, it comes as no surprise that governments and leaders of 87% of the 193 United Nations member countries now have a presence on the social network. The study further says 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.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the undisputed champion, with more than 215 million interactions on his Facebook posts in 2015, more than 5 times as many as the more popular Barack Obama campaign page. A closer look at the type of interactions shows that Narendra Modi leads in post likes and post comments, however the White House posts are shared slightly more frequently than those of Modi, while having only a fifth of Modi’s likes. Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri makes it into second position in terms of interactions on his posts, despite having far fewer (three million) likes on his page.
U.S. President Barack Obama is the most popular world leader on Facebook with 46m likes on his Barack Obama campaign page. Obama is closely followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi with more than 31m fans on his personal Narendra Modi page and 10.1m 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 5m 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 1.3m 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 200m 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.
Government use of Facebook varies from country to country. While some pages merely broadcast the daily activity of their leaders, others engage with their citizens, replying to the most salient comments and even allowing a free flow of visitor posts on their respective pages.
Indian government figures, including the President, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, dominate the ranking in the Asia Pacific region. The size of the country is clearly a decisive factor for these large audiences, however 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 all have sizeable audiences, each with more than one million likes.
The governments of only 24 countries have not yet set up 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 only four months later.
India’s Prime Minister makes a strong showing among the Top 10 most engaged leaders with an engagement rate of 6.7% despite his massive fan count. However, the Barack Obama page, the most liked page, is at the bottom of the list with an engagement rate per follower of only 0.89%.
A Picture Says More than 1000 Words
The most liked post on the institutional page of the Indian Prime Minister is the new profile picture of Narendra Modi who overlaid his profile with an Indian flag to support the Digital India campaign.
One of the highlights of Narendra Modi’s social media engagement in 2015 was the ‘town hall’ meeting at Facebook’s headquarters in September with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, which was live-streamed on the platform. During the 50-minute interview, Modi described in detail his vision of a digital government: “Social media means daily voting, there is no scope for a gap in communication with the government like before. The governments now get an opportunity to correct themselves every five minutes and not every five years”
