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The Digital Policy Council released it annual report on which world leaders are on Twitter. The data show:

Analyses as of December 2012 reveals that 75%, or three out of four heads of state, were utilizing the social media site Twitter. A total of 123 world leaders out of 164 countries had accounts on Twitter set up in their personal name or through an official government office.

The digital world has taken one more giant step forward.

President Obama, to no one’s surprise, is first among world leaders in terms of followers, at 24 million. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who is likely to die soon, is second with 3.8 million. It is hard to say what those followers will do when he passes away.

The next two leaders make no sense at all:

In 2012, PRESIDENT ABDULLAH GÜL OF TURKEY increased his following by over 2 million people. An early adopter of Twitter, he tweets mainly in Turkish but important statements are also made in English. Following his visit in 2012 to Silicon Valley he tweeted, “This is the first time a Turkish president travels to this region of the U.S. Here is where technology that changes our lives is born.”

QUEEN RANIA, THE QUEEN CONSORT OF THE KING OF JORDAN, grew her account by over one million followers despite the fact that she continued to scale back her public activities since facing criticism that she was playing too prominent a role in “running Jordan.” On her Twitter account, followed by more than two million people, she describes herself as “a mum and a wife with a really cool day job”

How can the queen consort do so well that she finished ahead of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Maybe Russians as a whole do not spend much time on the micro-blog platform.

The study does not say what these leaders “say” on Twitter. It could be that fame is more important than content.

Douglas A. McIntyre