With over 20 million followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, President López Obrador is no social media slouch.
But in case he needed additional affirmation of his clout in the digital world, a global communications agency has just ranked him as the world’s 14th most influential leader on Twitter.
New York-based firm BCW published its 2022 Twiplomacy World Leader Power Ranking on Wednesday, an index that shows that only 13 leaders are more influential than AMLO on the social network that was recently purchased by the world’s wealthiest person, Elon Musk.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, U.S. President Joe Biden and Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ranked No. 1, 2 and 3, respectively.
To measure the influence of world leaders, BCW created an algorithm that “assigns a tailored weighting to variables including mentions, tweets, retweets, reach, impressions, follower changes, likes and follower count” of world leaders.
BCW said that “engagement matters most” when it comes to influence on Twitter, which has hundreds of millions of active users.
“Online influence is no longer about how many followers a leader has or how many tweets the leader puts out – it’s about how engaged that follower base is, and how likely they are to interact with a leader’s message,” the firm said.
López Obrador is not an overly active Twitter user, but usually publishes at least one post per day to his account — which has 9.3 million followers — even if it is just video footage of his morning press conference, or mañanera.
Among the reasons why AMLO took to the microblogging site in the past two weeks were to acknowledge his meetings with Ecuador President Guillermo Lasso (No. 20 on the Twiplomacy index) and Colombia President Gustavo Petro (No. 4); lament the passing of actor Héctor Bonilla; post footage of his “counter-march” in Mexico City; congratulate Mexico’s soccer team — just after it was knocked out of the World Cup; promote the Maya Train railroad project; and offer an opinion on fellow leftist Pedro Castillo’s dismissal from his position as president of Peru.
His posts typically attract thousands of comments, and are also routinely retweeted and liked by thousands of Twitter users. AMLO’s engagement on Facebook, which he appears to favor over other social networks, is even higher.
The president has described social media as “blessed” because of the platform it provides him to communicate directly with his followers, and denounced the silencing of some users, most notably former United States president Donald Trump, who was banned from Twitter and Facebook after the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
He said last month that he voted in favor of Trump’s reinstatement to Twitter in a poll run by Elon Musk, while in January 2021 he floated the idea of creating a national social media network to avoid the possibility of Mexicans being censored.
While he has never used Twitter with the same frequency, forthrightness and ferocity with which Trump tweeted, López Obrador is a polarizing figure on social media (as he is offline), with ardent supporters of the president and strident critics using the so-called “digital town square” as a venue for mudslinging and name-calling in a seemingly never-ending slanging match.
Mexico News Daily
