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Uhuru most popular Sub-Saharan African leader on Facebook

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President Uhuru Kenyatta is the most popular leader in Sub-Saharan Africa, with 2 million likes on Facebook ahead of John Dramani Mahama, the President of Ghana. According to a new study released by Burson-Marsteller, President Mahama and Ethiopia’s foreign minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus have over 600,000 likes each.

The study, which collected the data in January 2016, showed almost 90 percent of all governments in the world have an official Facebook presence, and 87 heads of state, 82 heads of government and 51 foreign ministers maintain personal pages on the platform.

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 Indian 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.

Globally, the South African Presidency is the fourth most visited institution in 2015 (mobile check-ins by Facebook users).

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.Globally, the South African Presidency is the fourth most visited institution in 2015 (mobile check-ins by Facebook users)

The first installment of the 2016 edition of Burson-Marsteller’s annual Twiplomacy study – found that 169 of the 193 UN member states maintain an official Facebook page.

“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,” added Baer.

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.

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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.

The governments of only 24 countries have not yet established 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 four months later.

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