Kenya’s fifth President William Ruto is the most influential African Leader on Twitter in 2022.
This is according to the 2022 World Leader Power Ranking report from Burson Cohn and Wolfe's (BCW) Twiplomacy released on Wednesday, December 7.
Furthermore, President Ruto jumped nine positions from the 2021 global ranking to rank at position thirteen globally in 2022.
Ruto is closely followed by South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni as the second and third most influential leaders on the social networking platform in the continent.
Twiplomacy also ranked the President third among New World Leaders.
The ranking is informed by an analysis of data collected between October 1, 2021, and September 30, 2022.
At a time when new leadership at Twitter has made the future of digital diplomacy on the platform uncertain, one thing remains clear: You can’t take the social out of social media – even for politicians.
The top three bring together big personalities, geopolitical clout, and a strong domestic following – all factors that determine a world leader’s influence on the platform.
Twiplomacy is a digital diplomacy initiative by a strategic communication agency and part of BCW Global.
"The algorithm assigned a tailored weighting to variables including mentions, tweets, retweets, reach, impressions, follower changes, likes, and follower count," a statement from Twiplomacy indicated.
BCW’s Twiplomacy new ranking algorithm has been designed to identify what influence is on Twitter among a particular list of handles.
It then applied additional variables such as gender, age, length of time in office, and others to further contextualize, compare and understand influence factors in the ranking.
Ruto, who succeeded President Uhuru Kenyatta, has 5.6 million followers on Twitter, while opposition leader Raila Odinga has 4.1 million.
