Barack Obama and Narendra Modi most liked on Facebook

World leaders on Facebook: Burson-Marsteller study finds governments are turning to Facebook to engage with citizens

US President Barack Obama is the most popular world leader on Facebook with 46 million likes on his campaign page. Obama is closely followed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with more than 31 million fans on his personal 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.

This was revealed by the first installment of the 2016 edition of Burson-Marsteller’s annual Twiplomacy study. The study found that 169 of the 193 UN member states maintain an official Facebook page. Almost 90 per cent of all governments have an official Facebook presence, and 87 heads of state, 82 heads of government and 51 foreign ministers maintain personal pages on the platform.

“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 platform of choice for world leaders and governments to engage with their voters and constituents. On January 4, 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, CEO of Burson-Marsteller Europe, Middle East & Africa and Global Chief Strategy Officer. “It is also very refreshing to see that successful politicians on Facebook behavejust like any other Facebook user, sharing pictures of their home life, holidays and their children.”

Indian government leaders, including the President, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister dominate the rankings in the Asia Pacific region. The size of the country is clearly a decisive factor for these large audiences.

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.
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 per cent.

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 (President of the United States) page only publishes intermittently, but gathers more than 77,000 interactions per post.

The research builds on Burson-Marsteller’s annual Twiplomacy study. Initially focused solely on Twitter, the 2016 study is being expanded to other social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google+ and more niche digital diplomacy platforms such as Snapchat and Vine. An analysis of each separate platform will be released each month in the run up to the publication of the complete Twiplomacy study in May 2016.