Uhuru the second most followed African leader on Facebook
President Uhuru Kenyatta is the second most followed African president on Facebook with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi being the only leader in the continent with more followers.
President Kenyatta has 3.5 million Facebook followers as compared to el-Sisi’s 7.2 million followers.
This is according to the newly released 2018 World Leaders on Facebook study by Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW), a global communications agency with deep expertise in digital and integrated communications.
President Kenyatta is known for being a tech-savvy Head of State and a very active Facebook user who frequently updates his status.
In the run up last year’s hotly contested presidential election, President Kenyatta on two occasions directly engaged his Facebook followers.
VIRTUAL INTERACTION
First, on July 23, which happened to be the eve of the presidential debate, which he eventually snubbed, the president virtually interacted with his Facebook fans.
In an unprecedented practice by a sitting Kenyan Head of State, President Kenyatta responded to questions that were sent in advance, and the ones he and his team chose.
Then a week later and just eight days before Kenyans went to the polls, the president yet again addressed the nation via a live Facebook conversation.
The World Leaders on Facebook study placed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the most followed world leader on Facebook with 43.2 million followers.
US President Donald Trump is second with 23.1 million followers while in third place is Queen Rania of Jordan with 16 million followers.
RELATED STORIES:
Uhuru engages Kenyans on live Facebook chat
Here is Uhuru’s message to his fans via Facebook
The institutional page of the Indian Prime Minister boasts of 13.9 million followers while Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen wraps up the top five spots with 9.6 million followers.
The study analyzed the activity of 650 Facebook pages of Heads of State and government and foreign ministers from January 1, 2017 using aggregate data from Facebook’s Crowdtangle tool.
Meanwhile, over that period, the Facebook page of President Trump had by far the most interactions of any world leader on Facebook, with a total of 204.9 million interactions (defined as the total number of comments, likes and shares), almost twice as many as Narendra Modi with 113.6 million interactions.
Facebook has become the key platform for world leaders and governments to engage with voters, supporters and citizens. As of March 15, 2018, all pages of world leaders combined had a total of 309.4 million followers.