The digital landscape of International Organizations presents a mixed picture in 2026. Almost all the 111 organizations in this study are present on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, X and YouTube. More than half are also exploring Bluesky, Threads, and TikTok while a third is experimenting with WhatsApp and other broadcast channels.
Headlines
International organizations have their largest audiences on Facebook (173,000 median followers) while LinkedIn is catching up with 170,095 median followers, and X is relegated to third place with 131,372 median followers.
They have registered their biggest growth on Bluesky (20%), Instagram (18%) and TikTok (17%) while growth on X has literally flatlined.
For leaders of International Organizations X remains the channel where they have the most followers (14,580 median followers) slightly ahead of LinkedIn (11,141 median followers).
Growth on X has stalled for personal accounts (2%) compared to 26% on LinkedIn.
Three leaders have catapulted into the Top 10 list of the most followed leaders of International Organisations, namely OHCHR’s Volker Türk, @WFPChief Carl Skau – who took over from Cindy McCain in early 2026, @UNReliefChief Tom Fletcher. Their followers have grown more than tenfold on X.
Christine Lagarde, the President of the European Central Bank has become the most followed leader of an international organization ahead of UN Secretary General António Guterres. Guterres is due to leave office at the end of 2026 and Lagarde in 2027, and it is unlikely that their successors will have the same social media clout.
The leaders that have grown the most are those who tend to post engaging presenter-led videos regularly updating their followers.
In this study, we analyse the social-media activity of 111 international organizations and the personal accounts of their leaders on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and YouTube. The study includes multilateral organizations, leading non-profit and non-governmental organizations, and their chief executives.
Data was captured on September 1, 2026, using Audiense.com for X and a manual count on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, WhatsApp and YouTube.
The Most Followed International Organizations and their Leaders
The World Health Organization (WHO) is by far the most followed organization, with 82 million followers and subscribers on all platforms combined. The WHO isthe single most dominant institutional brand and #1 on 6 of the 9 platforms (Facebook, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, and Bluesky).
UNICEF is in second position with 64 million followers, ahead of the UN which leads on the other three platforms (X, LinkedIn, and YouTube) and clocks up an audience of 46 million followers and subscribers up 6%. The World Economic Forum and the UN Refugee Agency complete the Top 5 list with a total of 29 and 16 million followers respectively.
Six of the Top10 international organizations have seen their follower numbers plateau. Only the World Food Programme (WFP), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and UNESCO have increased their audiences by 22% to 30%. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has notably doubled its followers from 2.2 to 4.6 million.
Christine Lagarde, the President of the European Central Bank has become the most followed leader of an international organization with 6.7 million followers across her personal channels. UN Secretary General António Guterres has moved into second place with 6.4 million followers ahead of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) with 4.7 million followers on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X combined. @UNICEFChief Catherine Russel who has doubled her followers is in 4th position ahead of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Director General of the World Trade Organization
Carl Skau the acting Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), Volker Türk, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Tom Fletcher, the Head of UNOCHA have made their entry into the Top 10 list this year thanks to their exceptional growth mainly on X.
It will be interesting to see who will become the next UN Secretary General, the next head of the WHO and the next president of the European Central Bank. António Guterres, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Christine Lagarde have amassed millions of followers and in turn raised the digital profile of their respective organizations during their tenure.
One thing is for sure their successors are unlikely to have such a strong social media footprint. Among the candidates to become UN Secretary General, Chile’s former President Michelle Bachelet has 1.4 million followers n her social media platforms. Ecuador’s María Fernanda Espinosa has 169,206 just ahead of Argentina’s Rafael Mariano Grossi, the Director General of the IAEA with 163,587 followers. Rebeca Grynspan, the UNCTAD Secretary-General on temporary leave has 71,735 followers.
Considering the above, to stay digitally on top it might have been better for their organizations to set up personal-institutional accounts which could then be transferred to each new office holder and grow over time.
Bluesky
Three quarters of the leading international organizations have set up a presence on Bluesky, but most of them are still small with a median average account size of 1,445 followers. The 27 personal accounts have a median average of only 404 followers per account.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have 175,000 and 121,000 followers respectively and seen a modest growth of 4% on the platform. The European Space Agency (ESA) has rocketed into third place, doubling its size from 50,000 to 103,000 followers year-on-year.
Amnesty International UK and the UN Environment Programme complete the Top 5 list with 30,000 and 21,000 followers respectively. The 104 institutional and personal accounts have grown by 21% over the past year.
Annalena Baerbock, the outgoing President of the 80th Session of the UN General Assembly leads the pack with her personal account which was archived after leaving her post as Germany’s Foreign Minister and has lost some followers as it has been dormant ever since. Her personal-institutional account https://bsky.app/profile/unpga.bsky.social has more than doubled in size but stands only at 1,488 followers.
For many organizations the engagement on Bluesky is not worth the effort, and it is not surprising that UNESCO, which was among the Top 10 with 30,000 followers in 2025, has deleted its account. Many organizations are still standing on the sidelines wondering whether they should engage on the burgeoning platform.
Facebook
Almost all international organizations have a presence on Facebook. The 110 institutional pages have a total of 166,062,306 followers compared to only four million for the 49 personal pages and profiles of their leaders. The median average stands at 173,000 followers for institutional pages and only 6,100 for personal accounts. The institutional pages have seen a median average growth of 6% while the personal accounts seem to stagnate.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF lead the Facebook rankings with 36 and 29 million followers respectively. The WHO has continued to lose followers while UNICEF is stable. With 8.9 million followers the United Nations page has grown by 16% moving into third place ahead of the World Economic Forum with 8.8 million followers. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) completes the Top 5 list with 4.9 million followers. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has seen one of the strongest growth rates more than tripling its follower numbers reaching 2.7 million.
Facebook does not necessarily come to mind as the platform of choice for executive communications, but 49 leaders of international organizations have either official pages or personal profiles on Facebook. The Director General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus leads the rankings by a mile with 1.5 million followers, up 7% compared to September 2025. There is a strong female presence in the Facebook leaders ranking: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank and Dr. Sania Nishtar, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance are in second, third, and fourth place with around 400,000 followers each. Another female leader, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) closes the list of the Top 5 most followed international organizations leaders.
Instagram
The World Health Organization (WHO) is leading the Instagram rankings with 1.7 million followers, but UNICEF is slowly catching up with 11.2 million followers. For the second year in a row both organizations have seen their follower numbers drop by more than 1% which could indicate that they have reached their potential on the platform.
The United Nations, the World Economic Forum and Greenpeace complete the Top 5 list with 8.5, 5.2 and 4 million followers respectively. All 106 institutional accounts combined have 83,295,519 followers and a median average of 51,368 per account. The median growth of the accounts stands at 18%. The European Central Bank (ECB) has more than doubled their followers reaching 209,000 followers as of September 1, 2026. The International Criminal Court and the UN Youth Office have continued their growth streak growing by 50% and NATO has grown by 36% reaching 2.4 million followers.
The 61 personal accounts of international organizations leaders, up from 54 in 2025, have a combined following of 3.1 million and a median average of 5,330 per account with a double-digit growth of 13%.
Annalena Baerbock, the outgoing President of the 80th UN General Assembly leads the ranking ahead of UN Secretary General António Guterres with 718,000 and 692,000 followers respectively. European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and Alain Berset the Secretary General of the Council of Europe complete the Top 5 list of the most followed leaders of international organizations.
During her tenure as Annalena Baerbock, the outgoing President of the UN General Assembly has tripled the followers on the institutional @UNPGA account, which was transferred to her successor, Khalilur Rahman in early September 2026. Several personal-institutional accounts including @Interpol_SG, @ExecutiveDirector_UNHabitat and @SecGenNATO Mark Rutte have doubled their followers which illustrates that these institutional accounts can be quite personal with each new office holder.
Rebeca Grynspan, candidate for UN Secretary-General and UNCTAD Secretary-General on temporary leave has tripled her follower numbers during her election campaign. Tom Fletcher the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief also doubled his community reaching 42,000 followers on Instagram.
Threads
Sixty-six international organizations maintain accounts on Threads, Meta’s text-based platform competing with X. All the institutional accounts have a combined audience of 12,918,150, a median average of 12,290 per account and a median growth of 7%.
The UN Youth Office has seen the strongest growth on the platform with 69% year-on-year. The European Central Bank (ECB), the IAEA, NATO and CERN have grown their following by a quarter. UNESCO on the other hand has mothballed its account which had 566,000 followers in September 2025.
Only 21 leaders of international organizations have personal accounts on the platform with a median average of only 702 but a 16% growth rate year-on-year. UN Secretary General António Guterres leads the rankings by a wide margin with 211,000 followers more than doubling his audience on Threads over the past year. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde are in second and third position with around 50,000 followers each.
Threads is intimately linked to Instagram and followers on Instagram are automatically ported over to Threads. This means that even dormant and inactive accounts can have large followings without ever having posted a single post.
On average the followership on Threads represents 14% of their Instagram community. The UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) Threads following is half the size of its Instagram community and António Guterres’ followers on Threads are a third of his Instagram followers.
LinkedIn
The 108 institutional LinkedIn pages have a combined audience of 90,776,033 and a median average of 170,095 per page. For the second year running the organizations have registered a solid median average growth of 15% while the 87 personal profiles continue to skyrocket with a median growth of 26%, the highest median growth on any platform.
The United Nations (UN) is in the top spot on LinkedIn with 6.8 million followers, slightly ahead of the World Health Organization (WHO) with 6.6 million followers. They are followed by UNICEF which has overtaken the World Economic Forum with more than 5.6 million followers each. The page of the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) is in fifth position with 3.3 million followers.
LinkedIn, “the world’s largest professional network” as it describes itself, is the perfect fit for leaders of international organizations and 87 have personal profiles, up from 80 a year ago. But not all of them are active.
Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank (ECB), is by far the most followed leader with 3.1 million followers. UN Secretary General António Guterres, who joined LinkedIn at the end of March 2023, is second with 1.2 million followers. Winnie Byanyima, UNAIDS Executive Director, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the WHO and Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Managing Director complete the Top 5 list of the most followed leaders of international organizations on LinkedIn.
Diene Keita, the Executive Director of UNFPA and Masato Kanda, the President of the Asian Development Bank have quadrupled their followers reaching 30,000 and 41,000 followers respectively. Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Tom Fletcher, the UN Humanitarian Chief and Rebeca Grynspan, candidate for UN Secretary-General and UNCTAD Secretary-General have all more than doubled their audience on LinkedIn over the past year reaching 67,000, 24,000 and 27,000 followers respectively.
Twenty-two executives are now part of the Top Voicesprogram, an invitation-only group of experts across the professional world who are being featured on the platform. It is no surprise therefore that all 10 leaders on the list above have the coveted Top Voices label.
Embarrassingly, 51 executives have still not created a custom URL for their LinkedIn profiles and kept the number combination at the end of their profile URLs such as Fatih Birol, the IEA Executive Director.
LinkedIn Newsletter
Publishing a regular newsletter is the best way to create a new touchpoint with your current followers and potentially reach new LinkedIn users. Forty-five organizations are publishing newsletters from the Asian Development Bank’s ADB update to the WTO – Weekly Newsletter. All the newsletters combined have a subscriber base of 21.4 million with a median average of 245,613 subscribers for each newsletter and growing at an average of 17%.
Newsletter subscribers tend to grow with the follower number of pages and it is therefore no surprise that the Fast Facts from the UN have 2.6 million subscribers followed by the WHO’s Health For All Newsletter with 2.4 million subscribers and the UNICEF Spotlight in third position with 1.6 million subscribers.
The Latest from UNCTAD has doubled its subscription over the past 12 months reaching 416,000 subscribers. Tom Fletcher, the UN Relief Chief is the only leader of an international organization who maintains a personal newsletter. His monthly Humanifesto has become a must-read for humanitarians and has doubled reaching 13,000 subscribers. On the other hand, the World Economic Forum’s 3 Economic Trends has seen its subscriber numbers decline by 28%.
TikTok
TikTok has established itself as a serious channel to broadcast vertical videos. Sixty-four international organisations and seven of their leaders have set up channels on the platform. The institutional channels have a combined total of 18,839,877.
The channel of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the UN Youth Office have both more than quadrupled their followers now reaching close to 600,000 followers and 43,000 respectively. Five other channels have doubled their following over the past year. The median average growth rate of all the institutional accounts stands at 17%.
So far only seven leaders have dared to create a channel on TikTok including Annalena Baerbock, the President of the 80th Session of the General Assembly (19,000 followers), Barham Salih, the High Commissioner for Refugees (14,900) and Tom Fletcher, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.
“It is important to be there where the conversations are”, said Tom Fletcher in his first TikTok video posted in early November 2025 admitting that he launched the channel “against his better judgement and against the advice of everyone, including my kids.” Over the past 10 months he has garnered 2,867 followers and 19,200 likes on his videos from the world’s hotspots.
And finally, the World Economic Forum leads in terms of likes on their videos with 18.8 million and counting.
X
X (formerly known as Twitter) is still very much used by all 111 international organizations in this study. However, overall institutional growth is flat. With a median average of only +0.3%, X is the slowest-growing platform among international organizations.
The United Nations is leading the X rankings with 16.1 million followers ahead of the World Health Organization (WHO) with 12.6 million followers. UNICEF is in third place with 10.5 million followers. Almost all 10 leading accounts have more than 4 million followers with the IMF, UN Women and the World Food Programme almost doubling their audiences on the platform.
All 111 institutional X accounts have a combined following of 134,128,114 with a median average of 131,372 per account. The personal accounts of leaders of international organizations have a combined following of 34,218,944 and a median average of 14,580 and registered a modest median average growth of only 2%.
Seven of the ten most followed leaders have made massive gains in followers over the past 12 months. UN Secretary General António Guterres, almost doubled his followers and is leading the pack with 4.3 million followers ahead of European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde who more than tripled her followers over the past 12 months surpassing Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Director General of the WTO who is in third place with 2.5 million followers.
OHCHR’s Volker Türk, WFP’s acting head Carl Skau (@WFPChief), UNICEF’s Catherine Russell (@UnicefChief), and UNOCHA’s Tom Fletcher (@UNReliefChief) have increased their followers more than tenfold and have each more than 2 million followers. All four accounts have highlighted the dire situation of civilians in Gaza and other humanitarian hotspots around the world, topics which have gained major media attention over the past year and are relentlessly defending the UN system and calling for increased funding.
It is interesting to note that 34 of the 110 personal accounts are ‘personal-institutional’ accounts such as the @UN_PGA which was one of the first, created in October 2012 under Vuk Jeremić, the 67th President of the UN General Assembly and has been transferred to the subsequent assembly presidents ever since.
YouTube
The United Nations leads the rankings on YouTube with 3.3 million subscribers more than twice as many as the European Space Agency (ESA) with 1.4 million subscribers. With just over a million subscribers the World Economic Forum is in third place of the most followed international organizations.
All organizations continue to grow on YouTube at a median rate of 7% annually. The channel of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has registered an outstanding growth of 54% year on year reaching 103,000 subscribers. The median average of subscribers for the 115 institutional and personal channels stands at 18,000.
Although only in 11th place in terms of subscribers, Greenpeace has the best average video views of 85,473 for each of their 1,188 videos on the platform. UNICEF averages 85,196 views on their 4,900 videos and boasts 417 million views in total. All the videos on the channels of international organizations combined have been viewed 3.2 billion times and counting.
Personal channels are essentially a non-factor here. The six personal channels have barely any meaningful subscriber counts. YouTube remains an institutional/broadcast channel.
Broadcast Channels
Meta rolled out broadcast channels on Instagram in February 2023, WhatsApp in June and Facebook in October of the same year.
Broadcast channels are one-to-many channels where users can only react with a pre-defined set of emojis and vote in polls but cannot comment or reply to the posts which is a safe way to communicate to large audiences without the negativity of other more ‘social’ media platforms.
A handful of international organizations have been invited to join and trial the new channels at launch with smashing success.
WhatsApp
Meta’s messaging platform WhatsApp continues to attract international organizations: 37 organizations have set up channels on WhatsApp up from 29 a year ago.
However, these organisations which were early adopters of the broadcast channel and promoted globally on the platform have seen their follower numbers tank. UNICEF has lost a quarter of their subscribers and UNHCR, the WHO and the WEF have lost a fifth each.
Only two leaders have personal broadcast channels, namely UNICEF Chief Catherine Russell and UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric with 1.9 million and 600,000 followers respectively.
Meta’s broadcast channels were initially reserved for organizations with more than a million followers on Facebook or Instagram but over the past year other organizations have joined the flock. The International Organization for Migration has quadrupled its followers reaching close to 37,000 followers which is less the result of its posts but a due to promotion in certain markets.
To make an impact on the platform it is essential to be featured on the suggested channel lists in the different markets or globally. INTERPOL for example was promoted in France and reached 16,000 subscribers from inception and has not grown much beyond its French audience since. The channel is not featured in other markets globally and therefore literally undiscoverable. Many of the newcomers struggle to reach the 1,000-subscriber mark without being promoted by Meta.
A level global playing field for these institutional channels will be key for broader adoption of WhatsApp channels among diplomatic communicators. Our own DigiTips channel is virtually undiscoverable, having reached only 4 followers since its inception in July 2024. Please give us a follow: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaTbcWtGpLHWbl6GVq08.
Instagram Broadcast Channels
Ten International Organizations maintain broadcast channels on Instagram. The World Health Organization leads the pack with close to 94,000 followers on its Health and Science channel. The European Space Agency (ESA) is in second place with their Cosmic Connection and the World Economic Forum is in third place with both around 60,000 members each. Half of the ten channels have less than 2,000 members. All channels combined have 257,600 members and a median average of 10,200 per channel.
Facebook Broadcast Channels
Only two international organizations, namely the World Economic Forum and UNCTAD have broadcast channels on Facebook’s Messenger platform. The World Economic Forum has 18,000 members and UNCTAD has 2,000 members. Facebook does not currently offer a single, centralized public directory or global search tab to browse all broadcast channels across the entire platform.
In 2026 the use of social media channels for communications has become ubiquitous. Two decades after the emergence of social media no president, no prime minister, no government or foreign ministry can afford not to be active on at least one or more social media channels.media no president, no prime minister, no government or foreign ministry can afford not to be active on at least one or more social media channels.
Facebook and X are the most popular digital diplomacy networks among leaders: the heads of state and government in 161 countries have personal accounts on both platforms, representing 83% of all 193 UN member states. Eighty percent of world leaders have set up personal accounts on Instagram.
Slightly over half of all the heads of state and government of the 193 UN member states maintain personal profiles on YouTube, LinkedIn and even TikTok.
Newer additions to the digital diplomacy toolbox, Bluesky, Telegram, and WhatsApp have been adopted so far by the leaders and governments in around 50 countries, representing roughly a quarter of all UN member states. The niche networks such as Mastodon and Snapchat are only used by a handful of leaders.
Adoption of X is global with only four countries where the governments do not have accounts, namely Laos, North Korea, São Tomé and Príncipe and Turkmenistan. Six countries don’t have a Facebook presence, namely Afghanistan, Eritrea, Laos, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Turkmenistan.
Despite its radical rebrand from Twitter to X, Elon Musk’s social network is still the channel for real-time #DigitalDiplomacy. The 1,179 accounts listed in the digital atlas have a combined following of 818 million and a median of more than 44,000 followers per account.
However, world leaders have their biggest audiences on Meta’s channels namely Facebook with a median of 80,000 followers, Instagram with 29,000 followers and WhatsApp with 72,000 followers on average. The 451 channels on YouTube have a median of only 5,460 subscribers and it is even less for LinkedIn with only 3,585 followers on the personal profiles of leaders and their institutional pages.
Adoption of governmental social media communication is pervasive in Europe and in South America where all governments have accounts on Facebook, Instagram and X. European leaders also lead the adoption of LinkedIn and YouTube while all South American leaders have a presence on TikTok and all but one have embraced Threads. Despite initial security fears 39 out of the 45 European countries have set up accounts on TikTok, the vertical video network.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the most followed world leader with 390 million followers combined on his personal and the institutional @PMOIndia accounts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, X and YouTube combined. And he isn’t even on Telegram, Threads nor TikTok.
Most Followed World Leaders on Social Media 2026
US President Donald Trump ranks second with a combined following of 264 million on his personal account and the institutional @POTUS accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. He is neither on LinkedIn, Telegram, Threads, nor WhatsApp preferring his personal social network Truth Social.
Pope Leo XIV is the third most followed leader with 62 million followers combined on his nine papal language accounts on X and the new @Pontifex Instagram account.
While the leaders of the most populous countries obviously rank prominently in the Top10 ranking, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is an outlier. The self-proclaimed “Philosopher King” of a country with a population of only 6.3 million has established himself as the Latin American digital leader clocking up 47 million followers across his channels.
The only woman among the 10 most followed world leaders is Droupadi Murmu, the President of India. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Brazilian President Lula da Silva, French President Emmanuel Macron, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy complete the Top 10 list of the most followed world leaders on social media.
While all G7 leaders have active personal social media channels, it is noteworthy that only two of the G20 leaders do not have a personal presence on social media, namely Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.
Bluesky is the smallest network in this study by a wide margin. The 118 accounts of world leaders, governments and foreign ministries, up from 110 a year ago, count 1,201,607 followers between them, 0.15% of the audience the same institutions command on X, with a median of only 1,099 followers per account. Half of all accounts have fewer than a thousand followers. Yet the median account grew 22% over the past year.
It is also, overwhelmingly, a European network. Europe accounts for 72 of the 118 accounts and just over half of all followers, and the European Union’s own institutions alone hold 27% of Bluesky’s entire leader audience: Ursula von der Leyen (123,996 followers, +21%), the European Commission (95,469), High Representative Kaja Kallas (69,702, +27%), European Council President António Costa (18,339) and the Council itself (9,691). Nowhere else in this study does Brussels loom so large.
Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the most followed leader with 295,611 followers, a quarter of the network’s entire audience, though his account barely moved over the year (+1%). Canada’s Mark Carney follows with 197,773 (+22%) and von der Leyen with 123,996. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk (73,524), Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum (21,165), António Costa, the Netherlands’ Rob Jetten (17,970 combined on his personal and institutional accounts), Austria’s President Alexander Van der Bellen (15,607), Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who nearly doubled his following to 10,604, and Ireland’s presidency (10,440) complete the Top 10. Between them, the three largest accounts hold half of everything on the platform.
Most Followed World Leaders on Bluesky 2026
Bluesky’s distinctive contribution to digital diplomacy is not its size but its approach to identity. Instead of a purchased checkmark, the platform lets an institution prove who it is by using its own web domain as its handle, and governments have taken to it: Ursula von der Leyen posts as @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu, the Commission as @ec.europa.eu, Austria’s President as @bundespraesident.at, Ireland’s as @president.ie, the German Foreign Office as @diplo.de and its minister as @aussenminister.diplo.de, Finland’s government as @valtioneuvosto.fi and Norway’s foreign ministry as @mfa.norway.no. Of the 118 accounts, 31 are verified by domain and 33 carry the platform’s blue tick.
Foreign ministers are unusually prominent here. Kaja Kallas is the most followed with 69,702 followers, ahead of Poland’s Radosław Sikorski (20,090), Austria’s Beate Meinl-Reisinger (11,823), Canada’s Anita Anand (7,072) and France’s Jean-Noël Barrot (6,725, +24%). Denmark’s Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Germany’s Johann Wadephul, Australia’s Penny Wong, the United Kingdom’s Yvette Cooper and Spain’s José Manuel Albares complete a Top 10 drawn entirely from Europe and the Anglosphere. Germany’s Auswärtiges Amt, with 24,780 followers, is the most followed foreign ministry.
Most Followed Foreign Ministers on Bluesky 2026
What the platform lacks is everyone else. Bluesky is present in only 52 countries, and outside Europe, the Americas and Oceania it barely exists at all. Africa’s 14 accounts have 816 followers between them, a median of 30. Asia’s nine accounts total 671 followers, the largest being Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar with 242. India, Russia, Türkiye, Israel and Indonesia have no presence whatsoever, and the entire United States government is represented by a single @USAGov account with 265 followers.
The pattern is unmistakable. Bluesky grew as a refuge from X, and the leaders who moved there are those who found the alternative uncomfortable: EU institutions, Nordic and Benelux governments, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Brazil and Mexico. No populist of the right has followed them, no Gulf monarchy, no Asian power. Three years after its opening to the public, Bluesky has become the diplomatic salon of one political tradition rather than a public square, and its 1.2 million followers are less an audience than a statement about where a government prefers to be seen.
Facebook is most popular among government leaders in the Global South
Facebook is the social network where world leaders have their biggest audiences with over half a billion – 540,992,308 followers combined on the 838 pages of heads of state and government and foreign ministers surveyed.
Facebook is most popular among governments in the Global South and especially Asia. The 180 Asian government and leaders’ pages total 208 million followers (38% of the total) with a median of 162,000 followers, double the global median. European leaders and governments have more pages (226) but only 89 million followers combined and a median of just 66,500. Africa fields the most pages of any continent (239). Growth is healthy overall: the median growth among all pages is +14.6% year-on-year according to the DigiTips ranking as of 1 May 2026.
The leaders of El Salvador, Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Ethiopia all rank among the 10 most followed Facebook pages of world leaders. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in the lead with some 70 million followers on his personal page @NarendraModi and the institutional @PMOIndia page..
Most Followed World Leaders on Facebook 2026
Trump’s Facebook comeback. Beyond his personal @DonaldTrump page with 41 million followers and a growth of +14%, the official @POTUS page rocketed from 271,000 to 11 million followers over the past 12 months which represents a growth rate of +3,959%, the biggest growth in the dataset.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele places third. The Facebook page of the social media-savvy president has grown by 60% to over 13 million followers.
Most Followed EU Leaders on Facebook 2026Most Followed Latin American Leaders on Facebook 2026
India’s President Droupadi Murmu is the most followed female leader on Facebook with 6.5 million followers. Her @PresidentOfIndia page places 11th and narrowly miss the Top 10 list. Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni are the other two leading female leaders with 5.9 and 4.3 million followers respectively on their Facebook pages.
Most Followed African Leaders on Facebook 2026Most Followed Arab Leaders on Facebook 2026Most Followed East Asian Leaders on Facebook 2026
G7 leaders are Facebook minnows.
Apart from Donald Trump the G7 leaders show poorly on Facebook. French President Emmanuel Macron is the most followed EU leader with 5.7 million, ahead of Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni with 4.3 million and newly elected Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar with 1.4 million. Canada’s Mark Carney almost quadrupled his followers up from 399,000 to 1.5 million. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (637,000 followers), Japan’s Takaichi Sanae (170,000 followers), and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (143,000 followers) have less than a million. Meanwhile China and Russia’s leaders are not on Facebook, but their ministries of foreign affairs are.
Personal beats institutional.
343 personal pages hold 335 million followers (62% of the total) versus 176 million followers across 472 institutional pages which seems to confirm that Facebook users prefer to follow leaders, not offices.
However, some foreign ministries have amassed quite large audiences namely the U.S. State Department, with a combined total of 4.3 million followers. The foreign offices of Egypt and India have more than 2 million followers respectively and the Philippines and Germany (which has a strong Spanish language page) register over a million followers.
Most Followed Foreign Ministers on Facebook 2026Most Followed Foreign Ministries on Facebook 2026
Foreign ministers are less popular on Facebook than the heads of state and government. The 116 personal pages of foreign ministers have a median of only 16,000 followers. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the only one who has more than a million followers combined on his personal and his senatorial pages.
And finally, Pope Leo XIV has no personal Facebook page, however Vatican News has a global page with 11 million followers in multiple languages.
Instagram is the third biggest platform for world leaders with 481,169,294 followers combined on the 753 accounts of heads of state and government, foreign ministers and their institutions, up from 700 accounts a year ago.
The typical Instagram audience remains smaller than on Facebook, with a median of 29,108 followers per account against 80,000 on Facebook, but the picture network is growing faster, with a median follower growth of 17% year-on-year compared to 15% on Facebook. Eleven leaders keep private Instagram accounts, and 22 accounts are dormant or inactive.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the first world leader to break the 100-million barrier on Instagram with almost 102 million followers on his personal @NarendraModi account (+8%). His Instagram audience is almost twice the size of his Facebook page.
Most Followed World Leaders on Instagram 2026
US President Donald Trump has a combined following of 63 million on his personal @realdonaldtrump account, which grew by a third to 44 million, and the institutional @POTUS account with 19 million. The @WhiteHouse account registered one of the strongest growth rates of any institution, up 43% to 12 million followers.
Instagram is Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s network of choice. With 16 million followers, the Ukrainian President is the third most followed leader on the platform, almost five times his Facebook audience.
Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto (15 million) is the only leader in the Top 10 losing followers (-1%), ahead of Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (14.6 million, +9%). Pope Leo XIV attracted 13.3 million followers on the new @Pontifex account within his first year in office, instantly making him the seventh most followed world leader, whereas he has no personal presence on Facebook.
El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele (11.9 million, +19%) and Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (11.7 million) follow, ahead of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (9.1 million).
Most Followed EU Leaders on Instagram 2026
Argentina’s Javier Milei comes in eleventh spot, with 6,433,202 followers, fewer than 30,000 ahead of French President Emmanuel Macron (6,405,925).
European leaders may trail in absolute numbers, but they are posting the strongest growth on the platform. Emmanuel Macron remains the most followed EU leader, up 44% year-on-year, just ahead of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni who grew 59% to 6 million followers. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz reached 3.2 million followers combined on his personal account and the institutional @Bundeskanzler account (+57%). Spain’s Pedro Sánchez more than tripled his following to 1.6 million.
Many leaders have started collaborations with their friends and peers or their institutional accounts to reach a wider audience as the posts appear on up to five profiles. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Indian counterpart Narendra Modi took the now historic ‘Melodi’ selfie during COP28 in 2023. Their most recent video collaboration in late May 2026 has generated more than 290 million views and 13 million interactions on Instagram alone and helped boost the Italian Prime Minister who is the most followed female leader on Instagram. According to Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni begged him for a photo at the G7 Summit in Evian in June 2026, a claim she has categorically denied. The exchange deepened the rift between the two politicians.”
Most Followed East Asian Leaders on Instagram 2026Most Followed African Leaders on Instagram 2026
India’s President Droupadi Murmu, whose @PresidentOfIndia account grew 28% to 5.8 million followers is the second most followed female leader ahead of Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum (3.1 million, +32%), and Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan (3.1 million, +12%). Japan’s Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae completes the female Top 5 with 1.3 million followers on Instagram, almost eight times her Facebook audience.
Most Followed Latin American Leaders on Instagram 2026Most Followed Arab Leaders on Instagram 2026
Geographically, Instagram is the mirror image of Facebook. Asian leaders and governments dominate with 213 million followers on 172 accounts, 44% of the total. Europe fields the most accounts of any continent, 245, but they total only 105 million followers. Africa, which has the most pages on Facebook, is Instagram’s blind spot: its 162 accounts muster just 20 million followers combined with a median of 7,472. Latin American presidents, by contrast, have the largest typical audiences: with a median of more than 100,000 followers per account, South America tops all continents.
As on Facebook, personal accounts beat institutional ones: the 323 personal accounts hold 380 million followers, 79% of the total, compared with 87 million followers on the 408 institutional accounts.
Foreign ministers barely register on the picture network. The 102 personal accounts of foreign ministers have a median of only 6,689 followers. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the most followed foreign minister with 5.6 million followers combined across his personal (2.5 million), Secretary (2.1 million) and senatorial accounts. He more than tripled his following in a year, the strongest growth of any foreign minister, ahead of India’s Subrahmanyam Jaishankar with 3.5 million followers (+37%).
Most Followed Foreign Ministers on Instagram 2026Most Followed Foreign Ministries on Instagram 2026
LinkedIn is the network where nobody unfollows, and where hardly anybody posts. The 450 accounts and pages of world leaders, governments and foreign ministries count 36,971,353 followers combined, but the median account has just 3,597 followers, the second-smallest typical audience of any network in this study.
What LinkedIn audiences lack in size they make up in loyalty: the median account grew 17% year-on-year and only six accounts lost followers. Audiences on the professional network only move in one direction. Engagement is another matter: almost half of all accounts, 47%, are inactive or dormant, set up once and quietly abandoned.
LinkedIn is also the only network in this study where institutions out-perform the personal pages of politicians. The 253 institutional pages have a median of 5,214 followers against 2,264 for the leaders’ personal profiles, an inversion of the pattern on every other platform. LinkedIn is a network of press offices, ministries and civil services more than of leaders themselves.
Most Followed World Leaders on LinkedIn 2026
However, leaders who are active and engaging reap the benefits. Narendra Modi claims his fifth platform crown with 5.4 million followers (+15%), ahead of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (3.5 million, +6%) and Emmanuel Macron, whose 3.1 million followers have all but stopped growing (+3%). Ursula von der Leyen (2 million, +18%) and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (1 million) complete the Top 5.
The story of the year, however, belongs to Mark Carney. The banker-turned-Prime Minister more than doubled his following (+157%) to become the first Canadian leader past the million mark, and it is hard to imagine a head of government more native to LinkedIn’s habitat.
The same logic lifts the platform’s other fast risers: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (+56% to 347,000), Belgium’s Bart De Wever (+47%) and New Zealand’s Christopher Luxon (+42%) – the professional-class politicians thrive on the professional network.
Most Followed EU Leaders on LinkedIn 2026
LinkedIn itself has taken notice: at least 15 world leaders now carry the platform’s editorial ‘Top Voice’ badge, among them Modi, Macron, Giorgia Meloni, both UAE sheikhs, Carney, Keir Starmer, Merz, Anthony Albanese and Cyril Ramaphosa. No other network officially certifies heads of state as content creators.
Geographically, LinkedIn is the Brussels network. European accounts hold 16.8 million followers, 45% of the total, with a median of 7,796, more than double the global figure, and the EU institutions themselves rank among the biggest accounts, from the European Commission (2.5 million, +13%), to the Council of the European Union (459,000) and the Dutch Rijksoverheid (413,000), with the French and Italian government pages at around 200,000 each. The Government of Canada (1.1 million, +23%), the Prime Minister’s Office of the UAE (414,000) as well as the governments of Australia and Japan rank prominently in the Top 10 list of government pages.
Most Followed Governments on LinkedIn 2026
The absentees are just as telling. Donald Trump has no personal LinkedIn profile, leaving The White House page (107,000, +34%) to carry the American flag, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Claudia Sheinbaum and Javier Milei are absent too, while Nayib Bukele keeps a token profile with 3,340 followers. The whole of South America musters just 609,000 followers across 30 accounts. LinkedIn is hardly present in Africa where South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is in the lead with 350,000 followers. The Global South broadcasts elsewhere. LinkedIn remains the network of the professional West, the Gulf, and India.
Most Followed African Leaders on LinkedIn 2026
Among the foreign ministers on LinkedIn French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot stands out with 120,000 followers and a 48% growth year on year. Luxembourg’s former Prime Minister and now Foreign Minister Xavier Bettel is in second position with 114,000 followers.
Most Followed Foreign Ministers on LinkedIn 2026
Xavier Bettel as well as Canada’s Mark Carney and Austria’s Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger are among a handful of leaders and ministers who have not yet created their custom URL. Their LinkedIn profile slugs still carry a letter-and-number combination after their names.
Foreign ministries do well on reflecting the size of their diplomatic network since most of their diplomats tend to follow the mothership. The page of the U.S. State Department aptly named DOScareers leads the pack (1.6 million, +9%) followed by the UK Foreign Office, the French Foreign Ministry, Canada’s Foreign Service and the European External Action Service.
Most Followed Foreign Ministries on LinkedIn 2026
The one non-Western power centre is the Gulf: the six accounts of the United Arab Emirates total 5.1 million followers, making it the second country on the platform behind only India.
It is interesting to note that the government in the Netherlands has created a showcase page for their Prime Minister Rob Jetten which is subordinated to the Ministry of General Affairs. The government of Panama has created showcase pages for the different ministries including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Presidency which is a smart way to reflect the government structures on the platform.
Which World Leaders are losing followers on Telegram?
Telegram is the only network where leaders are losing followers. The 111 channels of world leaders, governments and foreign ministries in 49 countries count 5,466,183 subscribers combined, with a median of 8,905 subscribers per channel. But the median channel lost 3% of its audience over the past year and 58% of all channels ended the year smaller than they began it, a rate of attrition no other platform comes close to.
The explanation lies in what Telegram became. It is the war network, and the war’s audience is receding. Ukraine, Russia and Belarus alone account for 45% of every subscriber in this study. Ukraine has eight channels and 1.5 million subscribers, more than a quarter of the entire platform, and almost all of them are contracting: the Ukraine NOW government channel lost 15%, the Office of the President 12%, Team Zelensky 15%. Volodymyr Zelenskyy remains the most followed leader on the platform with 670,970 subscribers, but even he shed 5%. Four years after Telegram became the primary channel through which Ukrainians followed the invasion, the audience is turning away from this channel dominated by a Russian-speaking audience.
Most Followed World Leaders on Telegram 2026
Russia’s state channels, by contrast, are among the few still growing, if slowly: the Kremlin’s news channel added 7% to reach 288,568 subscribers, the Foreign Ministry 6% and the Government 0.3%. Six Russian channels hold 671,816 subscribers between them.
Beyond the war, Telegram is the platform of Central and Southeast Asian presidencies. Cambodia’s Hun Manet is the outlier of the year, growing 41% to 554,116 subscribers, the second most followed leader on the platform. Uzbekistan’s Shavkat Mirziyoyev (241,686, +16%), Belarus’s presidential pool (245,335, +8%) and Kazakhstan’s Aqorda (76,253, +21%) follow, with the Kazakh presidential broadcaster growing fastest of all at +146%. Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed (168,634, +9%) is the only African leader of scale, and Syria’s new presidency channel enters the ranking at 199,973 subscribers. India’s MyGov Newsdesk, meanwhile, lost a fifth of its subscribers, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan 16% and Brazil’s Canal do Lula 16%.
What is most revealing, however, is how Western governments use Telegram: not to reach their own citizens, but to reach other people’s. Western Europe fields just six channels with 49,618 subscribers in total. Emmanuel Macron, with 32,640, is the only Western leader with a meaningful presence, and three of France’s four channels are the Élysée, the foreign ministry’s Russian-language feed and his foreign minister. Germany’s only channel is its embassy in Moscow. The United States is represented by two channels alone, one broadcasting in Russian and one in Persian. Israel runs seven, in Hebrew, Russian, Persian, Arabic and English, its Persian-language channel almost doubling to 115,061 subscribers.
Most Followed Governments on Telegram 2026
On Telegram, in other words, Western foreign ministries are not doing public diplomacy but counter-programming: speaking past hostile governments to Russian and Persian-speaking audiences on the one platform those audiences use. It is the clearest example in this study of a network being used as an instrument of information warfare rather than as a channel for domestic communication.
It is also, unusually, an institutional platform: 76 of the 111 channels belong to governments, presidencies and ministries rather than to individual leaders, and only 33 are personal. Telegram’s format explains it. A channel is a broadcast feed with no comments, no likes and no algorithm, well suited to a press service issuing statements at speed and poorly suited to a politician seeking a following. That may also be why so few new leaders have joined: unlike every other network in this study, Telegram is not attracting a new generation of leaders to replace the audience it is losing.
Threads is the network world leaders forgot. Three years after its launch, only 245 accounts of heads of state and government, foreign ministers and their institutions are active on Meta’s microblogging platform, up from 210 a year ago and 191 in 2024. That is barely a third of the 753 leader accounts on Instagram, even though setting up a Threads profile requires little more than a tap from an existing Instagram account. Their combined following of 21 million, with a median of 11,462 followers per account, amounts to just 4% of the leaders’ half-billion-strong Instagram audience.
The maths of the platform is sobering: the median Threads account attracts just 13.5% of its owner’s Instagram audience. Leaders bring their verified handle, their content pipeline and their name recognition to the new platform, and six out of seven of their Instagram followers stay behind.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the undisputed champion of Threads with 3.1 million followers (+10%), converting an above-average 22% of his Instagram audience. It is no accident: Brazil is Threads’ second-largest market with some 36 million users. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele follows with 2.2 million and the strongest growth in the Top 10 (+46%), ahead of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy (2.1 million, +13%). Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (987,000), and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni the EU’s most followed leader (695,000, +35%) complete the Top 5 list.
Most Followed World Leaders on Threads 2026
More striking is who is not on the list: six of the ten most followed leaders on Instagram have no Threads presence at all. Narendra Modi, Donald Trump and the entire White House apparatus, Prabowo Subianto, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Pope Leo XIV and King Charles III are all absent, as are Emmanuel Macron, Javier Milei and India’s President Droupadi Murmu. The paradox is greatest for Modi: the most followed world leader on Instagram has never posted on Threads, even though India is the platform’s largest market with more than 50 million users.
Their absence is, in large part, of Meta’s own making. In February 2024, Meta announced that Instagram and Threads would no longer proactively recommend political content, which users had to actively opt in to see. For politicians, a network whose algorithm was designed to keep their content away from new audiences held little appeal, and Meta only reversed the policy in January 2025, conceding that its approach had been too blunt.
Most Followed EU Leaders on Threads 2026
Threads was effectively closed for political business during the exact window when world leaders were deciding whether to adopt it. Donald Trump is a case apart: the US President co-owns his own network, Truth Social, where he is contractually bound to post first, and was banned from Meta’s platforms between 2021 and 2023. For everyone else the calculus was simply unfavourable: X still holds the diplomatic and journalistic audience that leaders want for their text statements, while Threads offered a fraction of an audience they already had elsewhere, for a parallel content workload.
Most Followed Latin American Leaders on Threads 2026
The result is a platform of abandoned storefronts. 95 of the 245 accounts, or 39%, are dormant or inactive. Many leaders set up shop in the early days, posted a few times, and quietly walked away. And yet, no one is losing followers: the median account grew by 23% year-on-year, the strongest growth rate of any network in this study, and only a single account registered a decline. Threads followers accumulate whether leaders post or not.
Most Followed Foreign Ministers on Threads 2026
There are signs the calculus is changing. Threads reached 500 million monthly active users in June 2026 and overtook X in daily active users in late 2025, closing in on its rival’s estimated 550 million monthly users. Since political content returned to the recommendation algorithms, the early adopters are being rewarded: the European Commission (371,000, +83%) and Ursula von der Leyen (242,000, +114%) retain over 31% of their Instagram audiences on Threads, the best conversion rates of any Western institution, and the fastest-growing account in the entire dataset is the presidency of the Democratic Republic of Congo (+137%). Egypt’s presidency has even achieved the rarest feat: its Threads following is double its Instagram audience, the only major account where the newcomer beats the incumbent. For the holdouts, the network they forgot may soon be too big to ignore.
TikTok is the only major network on which the world’s most followed leader does not exist. Narendra Modi, who tops the rankings on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and X, has no TikTok account, for the simple reason that his own government banned the platform in June 2020 and has never lifted the ban. Six years on, the absence of India, and of China, still shapes the map of political TikTok.
What is left is smaller but far livelier than the numbers suggest. The 370 accounts of world leaders, governments and foreign ministries across 143 countries count 132,390,164 followers combined, less than a fifth of the following on X, with a median of 13,750 followers per account. But they have collected more than 1.9 billion likes, and the audience is growing faster than on almost any other platform: the median account gained 19% over the past year and only 13% of accounts lost followers, against 35% on X.
With Modi absent, Donald Trump tops the ranking, and on a platform he once tried to ban. His @realDonaldTrump account counts 16.4 million followers (+9%) and the campaign-style @TeamTrump account another 13.6 million, with a staggering 361 million likes, the most of any political account in this study. The White House adds 6.5 million followers.
Most Followed World Leaders on TikTok 2026
In January 2026, after four extensions of the divest-or-ban deadline, TikTok’s U.S. operations passed to the majority American-owned TikTok USDS Joint Venture, with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX holding 45% and ByteDance retaining 19.9%. The platform Trump moved to outlaw in 2020 he now both governs and dominates.
Behind him, TikTok is Latin America’s network. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is the most followed leader outside the United States with 11.7 million followers (+11%), Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum has 9 million and 158 million likes, making her the most followed female leader on any platform in this study, and Brazil’s Lula counts 5.4 million. Javier Milei (3.1 million), Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa (2.8 million) and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro (2.5 million, +25%) follow. South American accounts have by far the largest typical audience of any continent, with a median of 80,900 followers, six times the global median.
Most Followed Latin American Leaders on TikTok 2026
France’s Emmanuel Macron is the most followed EU leader with 7 million followers ahead of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni with 3.6 million followers after adding 50% in a year. Germany’s Friedrich Merz who has a personal channel and the institutional @Bundeskanzler account is in third place (931,900). Spain’s Pedro Sánchez (846,900) and Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki (624,800) complete the Top 5 list.
Most Followed EU Leaders on TikTok 2026
Africa and South America are the platform’s fastest-growing regions with a median growth of 24%. Africa’s 90 accounts across 38 countries hold 9.8 million followers, only 7% of the global total, with a median of 9,354 followers, below the global figure. But the continent’s combined following grew 54% over the past year.
Most Followed African Leaders on TikTok 2026
Kenya’s William Samoei Ruto leads with 1.8 million followers (+86%), ahead of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni (914,800) and Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who almost doubled his following to 489,600. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame (245,400) and Zambia’s Hakainde Hichilema (229,700, +93%) complete the Top 5 List.
Institutions are catching up fastest of all: the presidency of the Democratic Republic of Congo (1.5 million, +36%) and Senegal’s presidency (916,400, +43%) are in the lead and the government of Côte d’Ivoire multiplied its following sevenfold to 225,500 and the South African Government more than sixfold to 140,800.
The absentees, however, are as instructive as the leaders. Beyond India and China, Egypt and the Vatican have no presence at all, Türkiye’s presidency has fewer than 200 followers, Saudi Arabia is effectively absent, and Russia is represented only by its foreign ministry with 19,400 followers.
Nor is having an account the same as using one. Of the 370 accounts in this study, 102, more than a quarter, have fewer than 1,000 followers, and ten have none at all: reserved handles registered by governments to stop anyone else taking the name, then left untouched. Ukraine offers the neatest illustration: the dormant @ZelenskyyUA handle sits at zero followers while the Team Zelensky account, run by his office, has 2 million.
On TikTok, followers matter less than views, and the like counts reveal who has mastered the format. Cambodia’s Hun Manet has collected 36 likes for every follower and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa 30, followed by Hungary’s Péter Magyar (28) and Team Trump (27). Collectively, leaders’ accounts added 29% more likes over the past year, growing engagement faster than audience.
The most systematic operation on the platform belongs to Israel, whose foreign ministry runs a multilingual TikTok network: the English @Israel account (1.4 million, +27%), @IsraelinSpanish (949,800) and @IsraelArabic (247,900), for a combined 2.6 million followers across three languages, alongside Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal account, which doubled to 1.4 million. Ukraine’s foreign ministry (1.3 million) is the only other diplomatic service at that scale.
Elsewhere, the fastest growth comes from unexpected places. Armenia’s Nikol Pashinyan grew 262% to 362,000, Brazil’s @GovernodoBrasil more than tripled to 1.8 million and Peru’s presidency added 186%. Foreign ministers, by contrast, have yet to arrive. Only 40 have personal accounts, with a median of barely 2,000 followers, and Poland’s Radosław Sikorski leads them with a modest 65,900.
On WhatsApp Channels, Meta giveth and Meta taketh away. Two and a half years after their launch in September 2023, 78 channels of world leaders, governments and foreign ministries broadcast to 30,466,117 followers combined, up from 64 channels in 2025 and 35 in 2024. Thanks to WhatsApp’s enormous reach across the Global South, the median channel counts 72,107 followers, more than six times the median Threads account. But the platform has the weakest momentum of any network in this study: the median channel grew by just 1.5% over the past year, and almost half of all channels, 48%, are shedding followers.
One man towers over the platform: Narendra Modi’s channel counts 15.6 million followers, 51% of the entire WhatsApp following of world leaders, making WhatsApp the most concentrated network in this study. The Indian Prime Minister’s channel has ridden a rollercoaster that tells the story of the platform itself: promoted by Meta at launch, it peaked at 14.1 million followers in February 2024, lost 17% of its audience by May 2025 as the launch effect unwound, and then roared back with 35% growth to reach a new high this year.
Most Followed World Leaders on WhatsApp 2026
Most of the launch generation has not been as fortunate. When WhatsApp introduced Channels, Meta seeded the discovery directory and pushed a select group of official channels to its billions of users, inflating follower counts with people who tapped follow once and never looked back. Once the promotion stopped, the unfollowing began. The channels that already existed in early 2024 have shed followers at a median rate of 7% over the past year, with 56% of them in decline, while channels created later grew at a median of 6%.
The two-year toll on the early showcase channels is stark: Morocco’s government channel has lost almost half its audience since May 2024, falling from 600,000 to 310,000 followers, South Africa’s presidency is down 38% to 413,000, and Brazil’s flagship Governo do Brasil channel, once the second-largest in the world, has dropped 16% to 2.7 million. The decline is not limited to the early adopters: Claudia Sheinbaum’s channel lost 31% and Cyril Ramaphosa’s 34% in the past year alone.
Most Followed Governments on WhatsApp 2026
WhatsApp’s discovery directory surfaces popular channels country by country, and the newer arrivals are reaping the benefit. Spain’s Gobierno de España multiplied its following twelvefold to 283,000, Nigeria’s government channel grew 465% to 431,000, and Ivory Coast’s government added 57% to reach 423,000. Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, the most followed Latin American leader on the platform with 487,000 followers, grew 50% on top of quadrupling the year before, and the press office of Nayib Bukele added 67%. The UK government channel is up 40% to 389,000 and Germany’s Bundesregierung, which multiplied ninefold in 2025, has settled into steady growth at 742,000 followers.
Unlike every other network in this study, WhatsApp is a governments’ platform rather than a leaders’ one. Behind Modi, the biggest channels are institutional: Brazil’s Governo do Brasil (2.7 million), South Africa’s GovernmentZA (1.3 million), India’s MyGov (812,000) and the German Bundesregierung. Few heads of state broadcast in person: Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum (739,000), Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan (546,000), Cyril Ramaphosa (501,000) and Petro lead a short list. The format explains it: a WhatsApp channel is a one-way megaphone with no comments and no public metrics beyond emoji reactions, better suited to a government press office than to a politician in search of engagement.
X is still the undisputed heavyweight of digital diplomacy, but it has stopped growing. With 1,179 accounts of heads of state and government, foreign ministers and their institutions, and 818,004,134 followers combined, no other network comes close: X hosts more leader accounts than any platform and a bigger combined audience than Facebook (541 million) or Instagram (481 million), with a median of 44,369 followers per account. The platform that gave its name to Twiplomacy is standing still. The median account added just 1.6% over the past year, and 369 accounts, more than a third, lost followers, among the weakest momentum of the major networks in this study.
At the top, the crown is contested. Narendra Modi remains the most followed world leader on X with 165.1 million followers combined on his personal account and the institutional @PMOIndia (58.3 million, itself the third most followed account on the platform).
Most Followed World Leaders on X 2026
Donald Trump follows with 115.7 million combined on @realDonaldTrump and the institutional @POTUS account. The U.S. President can, however, claim one record: with 111.6 million followers (+7%), @realDonaldTrump is now the largest single leader account on any social network, having overtaken Modi’s personal handle which is, remarkably, the sole shrinking property in the Indian Prime Minister’s social media empire (-1%). Add the presidential Rashtrapati Bhavan account (28.1 million, the fourth most followed) and India’s top three accounts alone total 193 million followers.
Pope Leo XIV, whose @Pontifex accounts total 48 million across nine language editions, India’s President Droupadi Murmu (28.1 million) and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (23.5 million) complete the Top 5, ahead of Emmanuel Macron (10.5 million, +3%), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (10.2 million, +7%) and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (10 million). Gustavo Petro and Volodymyr Zelenskyy (both 8.4 million) and Nayib Bukele (7.9 million) follow.
African leaders are among the most followed on the platform but barely growing. Kenya’s William Ruto leads with 6.9 million followers, far ahead of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni (3.7 million), Rwanda’s Paul Kagame (3.3 million) and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa (3.2 million, +5%). Nigeria’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu completes the Top 5 and posts the strongest growth among the continent’s big accounts (+10% to 3 million), but the broader picture is stagnation: Ruto, Kagame and Ghana’s John Dramani Mahama all ended the year flat or marginally down.
Most Followed African Leaders on X 2026
The Arab leaders’ ranking is led by the Gulf royals, and they are the platform’s most conspicuous decliners. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (10 million, -11%) and King Salman of Saudi Arabia (9.7 million, -8%) and Jordan’s King Abdullah II (2.5 million, flat) all trail their 2025 numbers, while Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (6.3 million) and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed (5.2 million) are treading water. Algeria’s Abdelmadjid Tebboune (+4% to 2.2 million) is the rare Arab leader in positive territory.
Most Followed Arab Leaders on X 2026
East Asian leaders are quietly backing away from X. Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto remains the region’s most followed at 4.8 million but lost 6% of his audience, and Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim (1.9 million) and the Philippines’ Bongbong Marcos (1.3 million) also declined. The region’s momentum belongs to its newcomers: Japan’s Takaichi Sanae debuts at 2.9 million – X is by far her biggest network – South Korea’s Lee Jae Myung enters at 1.1 million, Cambodia’s Hun Manet more than doubled his following (+159%), and Singapore’s Lawrence Wong added 37%.
Most Followed East Asian Leaders on X 2026
Among EU leaders, Emmanuel Macron (10.5 million) remains in a league of his own: no other EU leader reaches a third of his following. Giorgia Meloni grew 13% to 3.3 million and Pedro Sánchez 24% to 2.5 million. At 1,712,312 followers (+6%) the EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is the fifth most followed EU leader. Five European leaders have personal and institutional accounts and are therefore among the Top 10 including Poland’s Donald Tusk (2.7 million, -4%), Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten (1.5 million), EU Council President Antonio Costa (1.2 million, -4%), Greece’s Kyriakos Mitsotakis (1.2 million, -3%) and Germany’s Friedrich Merz (750,000).
Most Followed EU Leaders on X 2026
Latin American leaders treat X as home turf: the region’s accounts have the largest typical audience of any continent, and its presidents the busiest keyboards. Lula (10.2 million, +7%) leads Gustavo Petro (8.4 million), Nayib Bukele (7.9 million) and Claudia Sheinbaum, whose +10% to 4.7 million is the strongest growth among the region’s presidents, ahead of the hyperactive Javier Milei (4.1 million).
Most Followed Latin American Leaders on X 2026
Beneath the surface, a very specific set of benches is thinning. The year’s decliner list reads like a geopolitical map: Erdoğan lost 10% of his following and the Turkish presidency 7%, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid shed 11%, as did UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed, King Salman lost 8%, the Kremlin 13% and the Russian Foreign Ministry 9%. Even the Holy See is not spared: the Pope’s Spanish and Italian accounts each lost 11%. The Gulf monarchies, Ankara, Moscow and the Vatican’s non-English audiences are all quietly draining from the platform.
And yet nothing demonstrates X’s enduring geopolitical weight like the accounts that surged. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi multiplied his following fivefold (+429%) to 853,000 in the wake of the June 2025 war, President Masoud Pezeshkian nearly tripled his, and Israel’s Persian-language account grew 25% in mirror image: when the missiles flew, the information war was fought on X. The other surge came from Washington: the @WhiteHouse account grew 163% to 4.5 million and @POTUS gained 31%, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio reached 7 million followers combined on his personal and @SecRubio accounts (+13%). Canada’s Mark Carney (+69%) completes the picture of a platform that still rewards those in the news.
Most Followed Foreign Ministers on X 2026
No platform is worked harder. El Salvador’s presidential press office posts 194 times a day, and Javier Milei, personally averaging 98 posts a day, is surely the most hyperactive head of state on Earth. Colombia’s presidency posts 41 times, and Gustavo Petro himself 27 times per day. For Latin America’s leaders in particular, X is less a channel than a firehose.
2025 has seen the emergence of bespoke accounts for real-time updates specifically designed for information warfare. The White House’s @RapidResponse47 rapid-rebuttal account fires 56 times a day to spread news about the activities of President Donald Trump. The French Foreign Ministry has set up its very own @FrenchResponse account in September 2025 which debunks fake and misleading news mainly from Russian but also U.S. influencers, including the White House under Donald Trump. The American account is a firehose, the French one a sniper and posting with a great deal of wit, still out-followed its own ministry’s English account.
Most Followed Foreign Ministries on X 2026
The oldest accounts in the study, Japan’s @japan and Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim, both joined Twitter in March 2007, and 111 accounts predate 2010. Yet leaders keep joining even in the Musk era, with 105 accounts created since 2023.
The platform’s verification chaos, meanwhile, is its own story: 38% of all the government accounts are not verified, 112 accounts are paying for the blue verification mark, while 608 carry the free official governmental grey badge.
The governments of Benin, El Salvador, Israel, Japan, Kuwait and the United States have taken out X’s premium subscription for organizations allowing them to have unlimited affiliate accounts for their ministries and embassies.
Geographically, Asia dominates with 334 million followers, 41% of the total, while Europe fields the most accounts (327) for 184 million. North America’s 168.7 million is almost entirely the Trump concentration, sitting atop a modest median of 19,000, and South American accounts have, once again, the largest typical audience of any continent with a median of 92,171 followers.
YouTube is the platform where world leaders have published the most and are watched the least. The 483 channels of heads of state and government, governments and foreign ministries count only 81,014,775 subscribers combined, with a median of 5,460 subscribers per channel, one of the smallest typical audiences of any major network in this study. Yet those channels have uploaded 803,417 videos and accumulated 28.4 billion views. Nowhere else do leaders produce so much for so few followers.
It is also the steadiest platform. The median channel gained 8% over the past year and only 7% of channels lost subscribers, one of the lowest attrition rates of any network in this study. Subscriptions on YouTube are a one-way ratchet: viewers may stop watching, but they rarely unsubscribe. That is visible in the activity data, where 105 channels, more than a fifth, have not posted a video in over a year.
No leader dominates any platform the way Narendra Modi dominates YouTube. His personal and institutional @PMOIndia channels count 32.3 million subscribers, 38% of all the subscribers in this study, and 8.8 billion views, 30% of the total, across 41,844 videos. Add the President of India (2.98 million), and MyGov India (1.11 million, +29%) and a single country accounts for more than 45% of the world’s leader subscribers on the platform.
Most Followed World Leaders on YouTube 2026
Donald Trump follows at a distance with 3.97 million subscribers, though his channel was flat over the year (+0.3%), while The White House grew 24% to 3.08 million. South Korea’s Lee Jae Myung (1.93 million), Brazil’s Lula (1.6 million), Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum (1.54 million, +22%), the British Monarchy (1.44 million) and Volodymyr Zelenskyy (1.37 million) complete the upper tier, alongside the Vatican’s main channel (1.16 million) and Mexico’s government (1.09 million).
The oddest entry in the Top 10 belongs to Nepal. Balendra Shah, the rapper and structural engineer who became Prime Minister in March 2026 at the age of 35 after his party’s landslide victory, brings a channel with 1.3 million subscribers and 97 million views from just 25 videos, an average of 3.9 million views each. Almost none of it is political: the world’s youngest serving head of government arrived in office with a rap channel, and it is the most watched-per-video leader channel on the platform.
Hungary’s new Prime Minister Péter Magyar leads with 399,000 subscribers and 151.8 million views, narrowly ahead of Emmanuel Macron (397,000, +6%) and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni (366,000, +23%).
Most Followed EU Leaders on YouTube 2026
Poland is the platform’s most crowded political market, with four channels above 100,000 subscribers: Prime Minister Donald Tusk (144,000), the Chancellery (110,000), the presidency’s Prezydent.pl (107,000, +90%) and President Karol Nawrocki (102,000). Hungary’s government channel, with 10,991 videos and 313 million views, is the most watched in Europe. The 96 channels of EU leaders, governments and foreign ministries count 4.2 million subscribers between them, less than a seventh of Modi’s two channels, with a median of just 4,040 subscribers.
Subscriber counts, in fact, tell only part of the story, because on YouTube the view is the currency and the two diverge sharply. Brazil’s Portal Brasil has just 275,000 subscribers but 4.6 billion views across 2,042 videos, an implausible 2.2 million views per video, and South Korea’s government channel reports 1.37 billion views from 1,082 videos. Numbers on that scale point to paid promotion rather than organic viewing: on YouTube, unlike anywhere else, governments can simply buy an audience, and several of the platform’s biggest view counts appear to have been bought.
At the other extreme lies the platform’s real character: the unwatched government archive. El Salvador’s presidential press secretariat has uploaded 30,588 videos, an average of 2,370 views each. Colombia’s presidency has posted 22,249 and Uruguay’s 20,018, averaging 1,456 views. Cambodia’s rapid-response unit has published 12,444 videos watched an average of 79 times, and the Prime Minister’s own channel 6,021 videos averaging 96 views. For dozens of governments, YouTube is not a broadcast channel at all but a public video registry: a place to deposit the footage of every ceremony and press conference, addressed to the record rather than to an audience.
Most Followed Foreign Ministries on YouTube 2026
The Holy See runs the most extensive multilingual operation on the platform, with ten channels totalling 2.9 million subscribers, led by the main Vatican channel (1.16 million), its Spanish edition (969,000), Italian (319,000) and, remarkably, Vietnamese (257,000). But the same archive logic applies at the margins: the Vatican’s Slovenian and Lithuanian channels have uploaded thousands of videos watched, on average, a couple of hundred times each.
Growth, where it happens, is institutional. El Salvador’s press secretariat multiplied its subscribers almost eightfold, the European Commission more than doubled to 469,000, Poland’s Prezydent.pl grew 90%, Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto 57%, Japan’s Kantei 43% and India’s Ministry of External Affairs 38%. Even the Kremlin’s channel added 24%. Declines are so rare as to be notable: France’s Gouvernement (-2%), Javier Milei (-0.8%) and 10 Downing Street (-0.3%) are the only significant channels that shrank.
Geographically, Asia holds 48.8 million subscribers, 60% of the total, and 15.1 billion views, while Europe fields the most channels (161) for 12.9 million subscribers. Africa’s 98 channels, the second-largest contingent, muster just 2.8 million subscribers between them, less than a tenth of Modi’s single channel.
In 2025 international organizations continue to diversify their social media presence on a growing number of platforms including Bluesky, Threads and WhatsApp as their audiences decline on Facebook and X and thrive on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok.
LinkedIn is slowly becoming the platform of choice where organisations have seen their biggest growth in followers over the past year. While other platforms such as Snapchat or Mastodon have fallen by the wayside.
There is still uneasiness with the atmosphere and the changes on X, but there hasn’t been any notable exodus from the platform. Most organizations are still active on the platform, although some have reduced their posting frequency. @Eurocontrol is the only organization which has gone silent since July 2024.
In this study, we analyse the social-media activity of 113 international organizations and the personal accounts of their leaders on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and YouTube. The study includes multilateral organizations, leading non-profit and non-governmental organizations, and their chief executives.
Data was captured on September 1, 2025, using Audiense.com for X and a manual count on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, WhatsApp and YouTube.
The Most Followed International Organizations
The 10 most followed organizations are in a league of their own. All have more than 10 million followers across all platforms combined.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is by far the most followed organization, with 82 million followers and subscribers on all platforms combined. UNICEF is in second position with 64 million followers, followed by the main United Nations account which clocks up an audience of 43 million followers and subscribers. The World Economic Forum and the UN Refugee Agency complete the Top 5 list with 29 and 14 million followers respectively.
The double-digit growth of the leading organizations is largely part due to their newfound audiences on WhatsApp.
Bluesky
Three quarters of the leading international organizations have set up a presence on Bluesky, but most of them are still small with a median average account size of 1,295 followers. The WHO and Human Rights Watch are the only two organizations with more than 100,000 followers on the platform. For the vast majority the engagement does not match the efforts of the social media teams, and therefore many organizations are still standing on the side lines.
Facebook
The audiences on the Facebook pages of international organizations have flatlined in 2025 with a median average growth of only 2.2%. With the notable exception of the UN and UNHCR which both saw a modest growth of 1.5% and 1% the rest of the 10 most followed international organizations have seen their followers decline on Facebook over the past 12 months. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has bucked the trend, doubling their follower numbers year-on-year to reach 638,000. The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) also doubled their followers to reach 23,000 and other smaller agencies have registered 20% growth over the past year including the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) and the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) – each having less than 75,000 followers while the median average on Facebook stands at 358,000.
Instagram
Almost all leading international organizations have a presence on Instagram where the median average of the accounts is just above 100,000 followers. The two leading organizations, the World Health Organization and UNICEF with more than 11 million followers are with the WWF the only organizations which have seen their numbers decline. Most other organizations continue to grow on Instagram with a median average growth rate of 13.63%. The International Criminal Court grew by 77% reaching 262,864 followers. The African Union, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the Mercosur, the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the UN Youth Office all grew by more than 50% year on year.
Threads
Sixty-five organizations have set up accounts on Threads, Meta’s attempt to compete with X. On average 16% of their Instagram followers also follow them on Threads. The median average of the 65 accounts stands at 30,000 followers and the average growth stands at 16.5% over the past 12 months. The WHO is leading with close to 2 million followers, followed by UNICEF and the United Nations with 1.5 and 1.4 million respectively. The UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) has doubled its followers year on year to reach 18,00 which is slightly less than they have on Instagram.
LinkedIn
The United Nations (UN) has overtaken the World Health Organization (WHO) in the top spot on LinkedIn. Both organizations have more than 6 million followers respectively. They are followed by the World Economic Forum and UNICEF with more than 5 million followers each. Most of the international organizations have pages on LinkedIn and all 101 pages have seen an average growth of 15% year on year. The account of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) grew by 38% to reach 878,253 followers. The account of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) grew by 33% reaching 746,181 followers and the African Union and the International Criminal Court (ICC) also grew by 33% reaching 386,167 and 321,274 followers respectively.
TikTok
The World Health Organization (WHO) has taken the lead in the TikTok rankings with 4.4 million followers, a growth of 57% compared to last year. The International Federation of the Red Cross is in second place with 3.1 million followers. The International Organization for Migration, the World Economic Forum, the UNHCR and the World Food Programme (WFP) all have more than a million followers while the median average of the 47 accounts stands at only 21,900. The World Food Programme has more than doubled their followers with a growth of 158% while the average growth of the accounts stands at 16.5%. The World Economic Forum leads in terms of likes on their videos with 18.8 million and counting.
WhatsApp
Twenty-nine international organizations have set up channels on WhatsApp. The World Health Organization leads the WhatsApp rankings with 8.4 million followers, followed by UNICEF with 6.7. The World Economic Forum, the World Food Programme and UNESCO complete the Top 5 list of the most followed organizations with over a million followers. These organizations were the precursors of Meta’s new broadcast channel which was initially reserved for organizations with more than a million followers on Facebook or Instagram. But despite an explosive start a year ago their follower numbers have been declining steadily since January. The World Economic Forum has shed 29% of their followers UNICEF lost 22% and the WHO by 14%. It remains to be seen whether more organizations will join the platform and if their channels will be available globally.
X
X is still the social media channel of choice for most international organizations. All 113 X organizations surveyed have a channel and are active on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
For most organizations the number of followers is flatlining with a very modest growth of average 0.41%. And half of the organizations have seen their followers decline including the Top 10 most followed organizations. The UN Volunteers and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) seemed to have bucked the trend registering double-digit growth of 11% reaching 300,000 and 271,00 followers respectively.
The United Nations is leading the X rankings with 16.5 million followers ahead of the World Health Organization (WHO) with 12 million followers. UNICEF is in third place with 9.1 million followers. Twenty other organizations have more than a million followers each while the median average number of followers of the 113 accounts stands at 232,259.
YouTube
Organizations continue to grow on YouTube with a median average increase of subscribers of 9.61% year on year. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has registered an outstanding growth of 65% year on year reaching 182,000 subscribers. The median average of subscribers for the 106 channels stands at 23,100.
The United Nations leads the rankings on YouTube with 3,16 million subscribers more than twice as many as the European Space Agency (ESA) with 1.27 million subscribers. The World Economic Forum is just short of a million subscribers on YouTube. Although only in 10th place in terms of subscribers, Greenpeace has the best average video views of 92,875 for each of their 1,087 videos on the platform. Amnesty International, UNICEF and the European Space Agency (ESA) average more then 60,000 views per video while the videos of the United Nations only average 11,621 views per video.
The Most Followed Leaders of International Organizations 2025
The three most followed leaders of international organizations all have more than 4 million followers. Dr Tedros Adhanom, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), is still the most followed leader of any international organization with 4.6 million followers on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X combined. Christine Lagarde, the President of the European Central Bank is in second position with 4.2 million followers. UN Secretary General António Guterres is in third place ahead of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Director General of the World Trade Organization with 4.1 and 3.1 million followers respectively.
The Top 10 ranking is largely dominated by women with Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Managing Director, and Louise Mushikiwabo, Secretary General of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie making their entry into the Top 10 list.
Facebook
Facebook does not necessarily come to mind as the platform of choice for executive communications, but 43 leaders of international organizations have either official pages or personal profiles on Facebook.
WHO Director General, Dr Tedros Adhanom, leads the group with 1.4 million followers well ahead of the WTO’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala with 447,000 followers. The median average number of followers of the 43 personal pages and profiles stands at just 3,600.
Instagram
Germany’s Annalena Baerbock is the most followed leader on Instagram with 685,000 followers as of September 1 a week before her taking office as the 80th President of the UN General Assembly. She tends to share her posts in collaboration on her personal @ABaerbock and the institutional @UN_PGA account which has only 30,000 followers.
Fifty-four leaders of international organizations have a personal presence on Instagram account, however, 11 of these are private accounts. UN Secretary General António Guterres is the second most followed, with 602,898 followers more than twice as many as the WHO Director General, Dr Tedros Adhanom, with 278,044 followers. The ECB’s Christine Lagarde, and Alain Berset the new Secretary General of the Council of Europe complete the Top 5 list of the most followed leaders accounts. All leader accounts have a combined following of 2.4 million followers and have been growing on average by 17% year-on-year which is exceptionally good.
Threads
So far only 19 leaders of international organizations have activated their Threads account which have witnessed remarkable growth over the past year. UN Secretary General António Guterres is the most followed with 139,491 followers far ahead of WFP’s Cindy McCain with 56,239 followers.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn – self-proclaimed “the world’s largest professional network” – is the perfect fit for the leaders of international organizations; 80 have personal LinkedIn profiles.
Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank (ECB), is by far the most followed leader with 2.9 million followers. UN Secretary General António Guterres, who joined LinkedIn at the end of March 2023, makes it into 2nd place. Winnie Byanyima, UNAIDS Executive Director, and Dr Tedros Adhanom, Director General of the WHO, complete the Top 5 list of the most followed leaders of international organizations on LinkedIn.
Embarrassingly, 50 executives have still not created a custom URL for their LinkedIn profiles and have kept the number combination at the end of their profile URLs such as Fatih Birol, the IEA Executive Director and Sania Nishtar, the CEO of GAVI. Seventeen executives are part of the Top Voicesprogram, an invitation-only group of experts across the professional world who are being promoted on the platform. It is no surprise therefore that the first nine leaders on the list above have the Top Voices label.
X
Almost all leaders of international organization have personal or institutional personal accounts on X. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, is the most followed leader with 2.5 million followers ahead of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus with 2.4 and 2 million followers respectively.
The 102 personal accounts have a combined following of 16,333,838 and the median average stands at 19,667 followers for each personal account.
Interestingly, Analena Baerbock, the 80th President of the UN General Assembly has archived her personal account @Al_Baerbock and uses the @UN_PGA which also has more than 300,000 followers. Several leaders have mothballed their account since 2024 including the Mirjana Spoljaric, the @ICRCPresident and Raúl Medina Caballer, the @DGEurocontrol.
Governments and World Leaders on Social Media 2024
The past twelve months have been challenging for governmental social media managers worldwide. The demise of Twitter with the rebranding of the platform to 𝕏, and the multiple changes to the platform – from the sudden loss of the verification badge, to paying for Premium features – have prompted community managers to look for alternatives.
While there has not been a notable 𝕏-odus yet, social-media teams are seeking alternatives. With every change on 𝕏, alternative platforms such as Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and WhatsApp have gained traction as governments and world leaders try to rebuild their communities and re-engage their audience on different channels even though interactions. Engaging on new channels is difficult since community engagement is somewhat lackluster on the emerging platforms.
In this study, we rank 4,267 social media channels of heads of state, heads of government and foreign ministers and their institutions on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Telegram, Threads, TikTok, WhatsApp, 𝕏, and YouTube as well as BeReal, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Snapchat.
Indian Prime Minister Modi is the world leader with the most followers. He has 276 million followers and subscribers on his personal account and an additional 72 million on his institutional account @PMOIndia. The Indian leader leads by a wide margin on the main channels – Facebook, Instagram, 𝕏, WhatsApp, and YouTube – but he is neither on Threads nor on TikTok, a platform which is banned in India.
The Indonesian President Joko Widodo is in second place with a total of 90 million followers on all channels combined. Likewise, he is not on Threads nor TikTok or any of the emerging channels yet. U.S. President Joe Biden is in third place with a total of 70 million followers on all channels combined – including Snapchat and TikTok – and 69 million total followers on his institutional @POTUS account. France’s 35-year-old Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is active on the Gen-Z channels such as Snapchat, TikTok and BeReal.
The European Commission has a total of ten million followers on subscribers and is the only governmental institution active on all the above platforms except TikTok and BeReal and has even set up a broadcast channel on Instagram.
For smaller social media teams, it is literally impossible to serve communities on all 13 networks and they will have to choose the platforms best suited to reach their national and/or international audiences.
𝕏 is still the most used social media platform by governments: 190 of the 193 UN member countries have an official presence on the platform – only Laos, North Korea and Turkmenistan don’t have any social media presence.
However, 𝕏 is no longer the only platform for world leaders to communicate: the leaders of 187 countries have a presence on Facebook, 178 are present on Instagram, 173 have a channel on YouTube and 163 are on LinkedIn. The governments and leaders of 106 countries are on TikTok and 87 have set up accounts on Threads over the past nine months.
These emerging platforms have been a challenge for 𝕏. However, none of these platforms are likely to ever replace 𝕏. Rather, all platforms will co-exist, and governments must figure out on which platform to invest their efforts and resources.
The 785 pages analysed in our study have a combined audience of 438,084,719 followers and a median average of 74,791 making Facebook one of the best social networks to reach large audiences. The overall growth of the pages over the past year has somewhat slowed with a median average growth rate of only 5.4%.
The new president of Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo has seen a 50-fold increase of his followers since May 2023. Ecuador’s new President Daniel Noboa has registered a tenfold increase of his followers which goes to show that Facebook is still the best platform to reach a national audience. Seventy-four pages have been dormant over the past twelve months.
Most Followed World Leaders on Facebook 2024
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the most followed world leader on Facebook with 63 million followers on his personal and his institutional page @PMOIndia combined. U.S. President Joe Biden has half as many followers on his personal and institutional page @POTUS. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo is in third place with 11 million followers. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan complete the top 5 list of the most followed world leaders on Facebook.
Most Followed African Leaders on Facebook 2024
Ethiopia Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is Sub-Saharan Africa’s most followed leader on Facebook with 4.7 million followers. Kenya’s President William Samoei Ruto and Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo are in second and third place with 2.7 and 2.1 million followers respectively.
Senegal’s newly appointed Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko has seen a 30% growth in his followers and Chad’s President Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno has seen his audience triple during the recent election campaign.
Most Followed Arab Leaders on Facebook 2024
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is by far the Arab world’s most followed leader on Facebook with more than 10 million followers.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq’s Prime Minister Muhammad Shia al-Sudani are in second and third place with 3.9 and 2 million followers respectively.
Most Followed East Asian Leaders on Facebook2024
Indonesian President Joko Widodo leads the Facebook rankings in East Asia with 11 million followers.
President Bongbong Marcos of the Philippines is in second place with 7.4 million followers and Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has 2.6 million followers.
Outgoing Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is in fourth place and Cambodia’s new Prime Minister Hun Manet who succeeded his father in August 2023 is in fifth place but hasn’t set up a custom URL yet.
Most Followed EU Leaders on Facebook 2024
French President Emmanuel Macron is the most followed leader in the European Union with 4.8 million followers, followed by Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni with an audience of 2.9 million on Facebook.
Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis is in third place with 1.8 million followers ahead of Hungary’s Viktor Orban with 1.3 million followers.
Slovakia’s outgoing President Zuzana Čaputová and Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen make it into the Top10 list with 380,000 followers each.
Most Followed Latin American Leaders on Facebook 2024
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are Latin America’s biggest leaders on Facebook with 10.4, 7.2 and 5.7 million followers respectively.
Argentina’s new President Javier Milei has seen his Facebook community grow by more than 50% over the past 12 months.
And finally, Honduran President Xiomara Castro de Zelaya is the only woman in the Top10 list of Latin American leaders which counts only three women.
Most Followed Foreign Ministers on Facebook 2024
Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron is now the most followed Foreign Minister on Facebook with more than one million followers.
Kenya’s Musalia Mudavadi is in second place with 765,000 followers, followed by Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó who clocks up more than 400,000 followers on the platform.
Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong makes it into the Top10 at N°10 with close to 200,000 followers.
Most Followed Foreign Ministries on Facebook 2024
Facebook might not be the obvious platform for digital diplomacy, and most foreign ministries are catering to a national audience on the platform.
The U.S. State Department is by far the most followed foreign ministry on Facebook with close to 3.6 million followers on its different language pages.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs is in second place with 2.1 million followers. The foreign ministries of Egypt, the Philippines, and Germany complete the top 5 list with 1.7, 1.3 and 1.1 million followers respectively.
Wondering which governments and leaders are on Facebook? Like @DigiTips on Facebook and peruse the accounts we’ve liked. It might be easier to get the full rankings of all 785 pages on Gumroad ($).
The 708 Instagram accounts in this study have a combined audience of 425,228,835, which is almost as many as the total Facebook audience for these leaders. The median average number of followers stands at 23,105 per account, only a third of the average follower number on Facebook and less than 𝕏.
However, over the past twelve months the world leader accounts had a median average growth of 10% which is twice as much as on Facebook and 𝕏. Seventeen accounts are private, and 116 accounts are dormant or inactive such as the pages of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Polish President Andrezj Duda.
Most Followed World Leaders on Instagram 2024
Having registered a 19% growth rate year on year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is again the most followed world leader on Instagram with a whopping 88.7 million followers.
Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo is in second place with 58 million followers. Both leaders had received over 150 million interactions on their respective posts in the last 12 months. The Indian leader has an interaction rate of 2.8%.
The institutional @POTUS account and the personal @JoeBiden account have a combined following of 36 million, but both have lost followers over the past year. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has shed 6%of his followers since May 2023 but is still in fourth place. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele made in into the Top10 list with a growth rate of 45% over the past year.
Most Followed African Leaders on Instagram 2024
The African leaders Instagram ranking is led by a woman. Samia Suluhu Hassan, the President of Tanzania has over 2 million followers on the platform and doubled her followers year on year.
In second place is Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo followed by Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame with 1.4 and 1.3 million followers respectively.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria’s new President has tripled his audience on Instagram and lands in fourth place with 1.1 million followers.
Most Followed Arab Leaders on Instagram 2024
The leaders of the United Arab Emirates top the Arab leaders Instagram rankings. Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has 8.6 million followers, ahead of the President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan with 3.6 million followers.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Iraq’s Prime Minister Muhammad Shia al-Sudani complete the top 5 list with 3, 2.3 and 1.5 million followers respectively.
Most Followed East Asian Leaders on Instagram2024
As on Facebook and 𝕏 the trio consisting of Indonesian President Joko Widodo, Filipino President Bongbong Marcos and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim top the Instagram rankings.
Joko Widodo or Jokowi as he is known on social media has 58 million followers far ahead of his peers with both at 1.1 million followers on Instagram.
Thailand’s new Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin has seen his follower numbers explode by an astonishing 1,762% year on year.
Most Followed EU Leaders on Instagram 2024
French President Emmanuel Macron also tops the EU Instagram rankings with 3.5 million followers.
With 2.7 million followers Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has shot into second place and an impressive growth rate of 69% year on year.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is in third position with 2.2 million followers on his official account as @Bundeskanzler (Federal Chancellor) and his personal profile combined.
It is interesting to note that female leaders are strongly represented in the Top 10 Instagram ranking, namely Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Slovakia’s Zuzana Čaputová, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.
Most Followed Latin American Leaders on Instagram2024
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the most followed Latin American leader on Instagram with more than 13 million followers.
The President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele is in second position with close to seven million followers and Argentina’s new President Javier Milei rocks into third place with 5.6 million followers, tripling his community on Instagram.
Ecuador’s young President Daniel Noboa has increased his Instagram followers 50-fold and makes it into the Top10 list of Latin American leaders.
Most Followed Foreign Ministers on Instagram 2024
India’s Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is the most followed foreign minister on Instagram with 2.2 million followers.
He is followed by Retno Marsudi, the foreign minister of Indonesia. Among the Top10 list are four female foreign ministers, namely Germany’s Annalena Baerbock, Argentina’s Diana Mondino and Australia’s Penny Wong which is an example of the emergence of a feminist foreign policy at least on digital platforms.
Most Followed Foreign Ministries on Instagram 2024
The Foreign Ministry of Israel with 1.5 million followers on its @StateofIsrael country account top the ranking of the most followed foreign ministries on Instagram.
The U.S. State Department is not far behind thanks to its language accounts in Arabic, Farsi, and Russian.
The German foreign ministry has two popular Arabic and Spanish channels with 150,000 and 100,000 followers respectively.
The French Foreign Ministry has recently added Spanish and English Instagram channels to its roster a prerogative to communicate on Threads.
Wondering who else is on Instagram? Follow @DigiTips on Instagram and peruse the accounts we follow or download the full rankings of all 708 accounts on Gumroad ($).
Threads, released in July 2023 is Meta’s latest attempt to build a text-based social network to complement Facebook and Instagram. Only a quarter of the 709 Instagram accounts in this study have activated a Threads account. Heavy hitters like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo are not on Threads yet.
Threads is intimately linked to Instagram: you need an Instagram account to set up Threads and the Instagram followers are automatically ported over to the new network, a measure designed to help kick-start the activity. However, despite the follower boost, only a small fraction of the Instagram followers follows world leaders on Threads: on average world leaders have 13% of their Instagram followers on Threads.
Furthermore, less than half of the 191 world leader accounts on Threads are active. One hundred channels are either inactive or have been dormant for months. This lack of enthusiasm for the new platform has two reasons. Firstly, the engagement on Threads lacks far behind other social networks. Secondly, Threads doesn’t provide any meaningful analytics and there are no third-party publishing tools which would facilitate publishing.
Therefore, many social media teams have decided to wait and see how the platform evolves, moreover since Meta has announced not to amplify political content on the platform.
On the other hand, some accounts are trying to be more social on the platform. Case in point the U.S. State Department has adopted a more conversational tone and often replies to its followers, which the department doesn’t do on other social media channels.
Most Followed World Leaders on Threads 2024
Threads received a boost when the U.S. administration joined the network on November 20, 2023, Joe Biden’s birthday. The U.S. President has quickly become the most followed world leader on the platform with total of 5.4 million followers on his @JoeBiden and @POTUS accounts combined.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is in second place with more than two million followers and Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador is in third place with more than 800,000 followers.
Interestingly, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister and ruler of Dubai is in fourth place although his account has been inactive since its creation at the end of December 2023.
Most Followed EU Leaders on Threads 2024
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was an early adopter of the platform when it was released in the European Union in mid-December 2023, and she has more 278,000 followers.
Czech President Petr Pavel is in second position followed by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen with 83,000 and 67,000 followers respectively.
The key to successful posting on Threads is t be conversational which is unfortunately anathema for most world leaders and their social media managers.
Most Followed Foreign Ministers on Threads 2024
Threads is still in its infancy and most foreign ministers have relatively small audiences on the platform.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is the most followed foreign minister with more than 55,000 followers.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Tanzania’s Foreign Minister January Makamba have 33,000 and 23,000 followers respectively.
Most Followed Foreign Ministries on Threads 2024
The U.S. State Department is the most followed foreign ministry on Threads with close to 200,000 followers.
The Foreign Ministry of Israel and the @StateofIsrael account clock up 158,000 followers.
The Mexican and Colombian Foreign Ministries are far behind with only 25,000 followers each.
The European Action Service @EUDiplomacy completes the top 5 list with 21,000 followers.
Wondering who else is on Threads? @DigiTips is on Threads and we follow all heads of state and government so you don’t have to. The full rankings of all 190 Threads accounts is available on Gumroad ($).
LinkedIn is the social network which has probably benefited the most from the decline of 𝕏. The self-proclaimed ‘professional network’ has passed the one billion user mark in November 2023.
All 423 pages and personal accounts of world leaders have a combined total following of 35,453,432. But the median average of all pages stands at only 2,541 per page. However, considering only the 169 active pages the median average stands at 18,595 followers per page which is still only half compared to the median average on 𝕏.
The LinkedIn pages and accounts have seen double digit growth of 19% over the past 12 months and active accounts have seen a record average growth rate of 24%.
Given these strong growth figures it seems surprising that no more leaders engage on the platform. More than half of the LinkedIn pages of leaders and governments are still inactive. They have never shared a post to reach a more professional crowd.
Most Followed World Leaders on LinkedIn 2024
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the most followed world leader on LinkedIn with 5.4 million, despite having shed several thousand followers over the past year.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in second place with 4.3 million followers. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates has garnered more than three million followers despite having been dormant for almost a year.
French President Emmanuel Macron and the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak complete the Top 5 list with more than two million followers each.
Most Followed Governments on LinkedIn 2024
The EU Commission is by far the most followed governmental institution with close to two million followers on LinkedIn.
The Government of Canada is in second place with more than 700,000 followers. The page of the UK Civil Service, the European Council and the Dutch government complete the top 5 list with more than 300,000 followers each.
Most Followed EU Leaders on LinkedIn 2024
French President Emmanuel Macron leads the LinkedIn list of the most followed EU leaders with 2.8 million followers, twice as many as EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen with 1.4 million followers.
France’s young Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is in third place with 276,000 followers.
Notice how several EU leaders such as Charles Michel, Ireland’s Taoiseach Simon Harris and Slovenia’s President Nataša Pirc Musar haven’t created their custom URL, still having numbers and letters in their handle.
Most Followed Foreign Ministers on LinkedIn 2024
Among the foreign ministers on LinkedIn former UK Prime Minister David Cameron reigns supreme with 2.3 million followers.
Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Xavier Bettel, and France’s Stéphane Séjourné are the second and third most followed on LinkedIn. With Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, Costa Rica’s Arnoldo André Tinoco and Belgium’s Hadja Lahbib they still haven’t created their custom URL yet.
Most Followed Foreign Ministries on LinkedIn 2024
The U.S. State Department is by far the most followed foreign ministry with 1.1 million followers of its Department of State career page.
The foreign ministries of the United Kingdom, Canada and France all have more than 300,000 followers on LinkedIn.
The pages of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs and the Belgian Foreign Ministry have enjoyed strong growth rates of more than 20% over the past twelve months.
Download the full rankings of all 422 LinkedIn accounts on Gumroad ($).
Telegram is the main messaging app in many countries of the former Soviet empire and in Iran. Founded by Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov it has moved its headquarters to Dubai.
Since the start of Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 Telegram has become the main news platform for Ukrainians. At the start of the war in early 2022 President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had 1.5 million followers on the platform.
For Western diplomats it was a way to reach Russian speakers in Russia and reach out to Iranians through bespoke language channels. The U.S. State Department communicates through its Russian @USApoRusski and Farsi @USAdarFarsi channels on the platform.
We have found 116 channels of world leaders with a combined audience of 5,798,108 subscribers and a median average of 7,288 subscribers per channel. Over the past 12 months all channels combined have seen a median average growth of 12% while some have seriously declined.
Most Followed World Leaders on Telegram 2024
Follower numbers on Telegram are fickle to say the least. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is still the most followed world leader on Telegram, has lost 17% of his followers year on year and stands at 770,000. That is less than half of what he had two years ago.
The presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey have also seen their numbers dwindle by up to 30%.
On the other hand, the news channel of Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei enjoys a strong growth of more than 50%. We cannot explain this kind of fluctuation of audience figures.
Most Followed Governments on Telegram 2024
The Telegram channels of the Ukrainian government @UkraineNow have lost a third of their followers over the past twelve months and the MyGov Newsdesk channel of the Indian government has seen half of their subscribers disappear.
But both governments are still on top of the Telegram ranking of governmental channels with 900,000 and 600,000 subscribes respectively.
Interestingly, the news channel of the Kremlin has seen its subscribers grow by 44% over the same period. The Belarusian, Kazakh, and Syrian government channels also continue to flourish on the platform.
The @pul_1 channel of the Belarus presidency is a good source for insights into the daily activities of the Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko who is personally not on any social media channel.
TikTok has been banished from government devices in the U.S., the UK, and the EU administration in Brussels for security reasons. It might one day be banned in the U.S. if its Chinese owner doesn’t divest the platform to a U.S.-based company.
However, these restrictions haven’t stopped world leaders from embracing the extremely popular video sharing app. Joe Biden opened his TikTok campaign account on February 12, 2024, to reach a younger audience all while signing the bill to divest or ban the Chinese-owned platform two months later.
The European Parliament started its TikTok channel at the end of February 2024 to bring the parliament’s work closer to Generation-Z ahead of the European elections in June 2024. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz opened his @TeamKanzler account, the only way to counter the far-right populists who dominate on the platform.
We have identified 207 TikTok channels of leaders and governments in 108 countries, a third of which are verified with a blue check mark. Forty-one seem to be mere placeholders and are inactive. The channels have a combined audience of 47,346,172 followers with a median average of 13,450 followers per account.
TikTok is the platform where world leaders enjoy the biggest growth with a median average growth rate of 26% over the past 12 months. No wonder event Donald Trump’s campaign team is considering a presence on the platform.
Most Followed World Leaders on TikTok 2024
TikTok is particularly popular with Latin American leaders and governments almost all of which have an active presence on the platform.
Seven Latin American presidents rank in the Top10 list of the most followed world leaders on TikTok starting with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele who was an early adopter and has clocked up more than eight million followers.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is in second place with 4.5 million, closely followed by French President Emmanuel Macron with 4.2 million. The French President is one of the few who organize annual Q&A sessions on his social channels.
Most Followed EU Leaders on TikTok 2024
European leaders have also embarked on TikTok and use the platform for serious policy statements, answering questions, participating in memes, or a giving a candid look into their daily lives and official visits.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni are leading the pack with 4.2 and 1.5 million followers respectively. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk is in third place with more than half a million followers.
The Polish President Andrzej Duda who was one of the early adopters set his profile @AndrzejDudanaTikToku to private, but still has more than 350,000 followers.
France’s Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is in fifth place and Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz who only started his TikTok journey on April 8, 2024, made it into the Top 10 list with more than 200,000 followers. As he announced on 𝕏: “I promise not to dance” as leaders are taking pains not to be seen as the grandpa at the party.
Wondering who else is on TikTok? Follow @DigiTips on TikTok and peruse the accounts we follow. Or download the full rankings of all 207 channels on Gumroad ($).
The 1,187 accounts analysed in our study have a combined following of 788,073,354 and the median average for each account stands at 43,851. The accounts have witnessed a slow growth of 5.6% over the past 12 months and 200 have lost some of their followers.
Half of the accounts are verified and sport a grey government badge, while some have decided to pay US$8 per month to get the precious blue tick and its Premium features. However, some leading accounts such as the personal account of German Chancellor @OlafScholz don’t have any verification mark on the platform.
More than 300 accounts are either dormant or inactive, but no world leader has yet ostensibly left 𝕏 to protest the changes of the platform. The only government which recently deleted its account is the government of Liechtenstein since their account had only reached 1,112 followers after 12 years of existence.
The Russian governmental accounts @KremlinRussia, @KremlinRussia_E, @Pravitelstvo_RF and @GovernmentRF are dormant since March 2022 when the platform was blocked in Russia after the attack on Ukraine. However, the Russian Foreign Ministry continues to share its propaganda on the platform.
The Press Secretary of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele @SecPrensaSV is by far the most prolific account with an average of 226 posts per day, far ahead of the team of Argentinean President Javier Milei @JMilei who publishes on average 75 posts per day and the Foreign Ministry of Venezuela @CancilleriaVE with close to 50 daily posts.
Most Followed World Leaders on 𝕏 2024
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains the most followed world leader on 𝕏 approaching the 100-million-follower mark on his personal account and more than 50 million on his institutional @PMOIndia account.
U.S. President Joe Biden is far behind with half of the followers of the Indian leader.
Pope Francis has 50 million followers on his nine language accounts but has seen his flock decline by 1%.
Most Followed African Leaders on 𝕏 2024
Kenya’s President William Samoei Ruto is Sub-Saharan Africa’s most followed leader on 𝕏 with 6.3 million followers. He is followed by Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame with 3.3 and 3.1 million followers respectively. Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan is the only female African leader in the Top10 list with 1.6 million followers.
Most Followed Arab Leaders on 𝕏 2024
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates is the most followed Arab world leader with 11 million followers ahead of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud with 10.3 million followers.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the President of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Jordan’s King Abdullah II complete the list of the five most followed Arab leaders.
Most Followed East Asian Leaders on 𝕏 2024
In East Asia Indonesian President Joko Widodo leads the 𝕏 rankings with a whopping 20 million followers far ahead of his Asian colleagues, namely Anwar Ibrahim, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, and Bongbong Marcos, the President of the Philippines with 1.8 and 1.3 million followers each.
Singapore’s outgoing Premier Lee Hsien Loong is the fourth most followed East Asian leader and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has shot into fifth place with a strong growth of 19% in the past 12 months.
In their defence, 𝕏 is much less popular in Asia than Facebook for example.
Most Followed EU Leaders on 𝕏 2024
French President Emmanuel Macron is the EU’s most followed leader with close to 10 million followers.
He is followed by Polish Premier Donald Tusk and Polish President Andrzej Duda with 2.7 and 2.5 million followers respectively.
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is in fourth place with 2.2 million followers and a very strong two-digit growth of 19% year-on-year.
Most Followed Latin American Leaders on 𝕏 2024
In Latin America many leaders still enjoy double digit growth on 𝕏.
Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is the most followed Latin American leader with more than 10 million followers on the platform.
He is closely followed by Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro with 8.8 and 7.5 million followers each.
Noteworthy is the strong growth of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele who made it into fourth place with 6.1 million followers which is almost the total population of this Central American country.
Most Followed Foreign Ministers on 𝕏 2024
Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates has been the most followed foreign minister for almost a decade with almost five million followers.
India’s Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has seen strong growth over the past year reaching more than 3.1 million followers.
Combining his institutional account @SecBlinken and his dormant @ABlinken account, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken lands in fourth place with 2.6 million followers.
The UK’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron and Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski make up the top 5 list of the most followed foreign ministers. Noteworthy is Germany’s Annalena Baerbock who makes it into the Top10 list with 723,000 followers.
Most Followed Foreign Ministries on 𝕏 2024
The U.S. State Department remains the most followed foreign ministry with close to 10 million followers on their multiple language accounts.
The Foreign Ministry of Saudi Arabia is in second place with 4.1 million followers. The Foreign Ministry of Israel which also manages the @Israel account has seen a 50% growth over the past year, a result of the Hamas attack on Southern Israel in October 2023.
The Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministries complete the top 5 list with 2.7 and 2.2 million followers respectively. Interestingly the Russian accounts have grown by 10% while Ukrainian followers have slightly declined.
@DigiTips maintains updated public lists on 𝕏 with world leaders, governments, and ministerial accounts worldwide. Get the full rankings of all 1,187 𝕏 accounts on Gumroad ($) and kindly let us know if we have missed anyone.
YouTube is still the platform where governments and foreign ministries share the long-form videos of their leaders’ speeches. A handful of leaders are using the vertical-format YouTube Shorts to recycle their videos designed for Instagram and TikTok.
We have identified 460 YouTube channels of heads of state and government, foreign ministers, and their institutions. All channels combined have 63,651,666 subscribers and a median average of 4.225 subscribers per channel.
The median average growth of all channels stands at 13% year on year. 136 channels are inactive and haven’t posted any video in the past year and many of these have not created a custom URL either.
Most Followed World Leaders on YouTube 2024
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is by far the most followed world leader on YouTube with 25 million subscribers and more than 5.4 billion video views on his personal and institutional channels which have grown by 52% over the past twelve months.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is the second most subscribed world leader on YouTube with 4.3 million followed by Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo with close to 3.3 million subscribers. Narendra Modi has by far the most views of any world leader with 5.1 billion videos views on his 25,794 videos and an average of 200,583 views per video.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak get the most views per video with 434,677 and 359,319 average views respectively. No wonder Rishi Sunak’s personal YouTube channel has more than doubled its subscriber numbers.
Most Followed Foreign Ministries on YouTube 2024
With more than 400,000 subscribers the U.S. State Department is the most followed foreign ministry on YouTube.
The U.S. State Department airs its daily press briefings live on the platform and often clips interesting extracts as YouTube Shorts.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs has 389,000 followers on its two channels combined. The Russian Foreign Ministry is in third place with 365,000 subscribers.
Most of the large channels have seen a two-digit growth rate since May 2023.
Find the full rankings of all 540 YouTube channels on Gumroad ($).
World Leaders on WhatsApp
WhatsApp is the latest Meta-owned social network which is giving governments and their leaders a new platform to broadcast to their audiences. In September 2023 the popular messaging app opened public channels, inviting selected international organisations and governments to trial the new channel.
The early adopters, the governments of Brazil, Chile, Morocco, and Singapore have seen explosive growth on the new platform. As of May 1, 2024, the governments, and leaders of 24 countries are active on the platform.
The advantage for world leaders of the new broadcast channel is that users can only react to posts with emojis and don’t have the possibility to comment publicly on the posts. On the other hand, the platform allows for voice posts and polls seems to be working well.
Most Followed Governments on WhatsApp 2024
The government of Brazil (Governo do Brasil) is the most followed governmental channel with 3.2 million followers on WhatsApp.
The government and the presidency of South Africa are in second and third position and the Moroccan and Indian government channels complete the top 5 list with over half a million followers each.
Germany’s Federal Government (Bundesregierung) which launched its channel in mid-April 2024 had almost 80,000 followers by May 1, 2024.
Most Followed World Leaders on WhatsApp 2024
In April 2024 world leaders started to sign up to the new platform. Not surprisingly, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is currently campaigning for his re-election, has close to 14 million followers making him by far the most followed world leader on the platform.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is in second place with 222,000 followers, closely followed by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni with 186,000 followers.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen who is also vying for her re-election created a campaign channel which had only several hundred followers on May 1 but is growing daily.
DigiTips also has a public channel on WhatsApp. Click here if you want to become our first follower.
BeReal is the latest social media platform to capture the attention of millions of teenagers around the world. The French-owned messaging app prompts users to post one picture a day if they want to see the posts from their friends and the public accounts they follow.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele was the first world leader to trial the playful app in June 2023. But it is the France’s Prime Minister Gabriel Attal who has set up a public channel where he posts regular selfies, whenever he meets a crowd of youngsters or when meeting his Canadian counter part Justin Trudeau.
Selfie of French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, shared on BeReal.
No other world leader has so far ventured on the platform, although it is probably one of the easiest platforms to use to reach a decidedly younger crowd.
World Leaders on BlueSky
BlueSky, a federated social network and a spin-off from the original Twitter and funded by Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey has recently opened its doors to large accounts. But so far governments have been reluctant to explore this emerging platform. Only the German government and the European Union are trialling the platform.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock set up an account in early October 2023 in the hope to connect with her peers, namely her Dutch counterpart, but so far, she remains the only world leader on BlueSky with close to 40,000 followers.
Mastodon is a German-registered federated social network. No wonder therefore that Germany is the most active on the platform. The governments of the Netherlands, Switzerland and the European Union have also opened servers on the distributed platform.
The German @Bundesregierung (federal government) has set up its own server and ten of its ministries have accounts on the platform including the German Foreign Ministry, but the account has been dormant since the beginning of 2024.
The Swiss government is quite active through its former spokesperson. The Swiss Foreign Ministry has accounts in English and in German/French but they have been dormant since Christmas 2023.
The Mastodon profile of the Swiss Foreign Ministry
The EU Commission is the most followed governmental institution on Mastodon with over 100,000 followers. While the Commission is quite active, the three EU commissioners who are on the platform are dormant. And finally, the Dutch government has also set up its own server to host the accounts of its ministries.
World Leaders on Snapchat
Only eight governments and world leaders have public profiles on Snapchat but most of them have been dormant for two or more years. French President Emmanuel Macron has 909,000 subscribers almost twice as many as Joe Biden with 469,000 subscribers. The French government counts 11,300 subscribers but has been inactive for almost two years.
The U.S. State Department is occasionally active with a monthly post on the platform. The last post from the White House was on Valentine’s Day 2024 and the EU Commission only posted once, on April 30, 2024, to announce the EU Open Day four days later.
Three leaders have created their bespoke Snapchat bitmoji, namely El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Finnish President Alex Stubb and French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal but it seems their accounts are inactive. All others only have the Snapchat QR code.
Given the minimal activity of these accounts Snapchat might not be the best channel to engage Generation-Z.
Footnote
For the following social media rankings, we used the total follower numbers as a benchmark, not because this is the most pertinent measure of influence on social media but simply because it’s the only metric that is publicly available on most platforms, except Snapchat and BeReal.
We used Audiense.com to gather data from 𝕏 and Crowdtangle.com to capture data for Facebook and Instagram. Data for all other platforms was collected manually on May 1, 2024. (That’s what we do on Labour Day). Since Crowdtangle will be deprecated in August 2024 we are grateful for any recommendations for other tools to capture data from social media platforms.
You can find the full DigiTips Social Media Rankings of personal and institutional accounts for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Telegram, Threads, TikTok, WhatsApp, 𝕏, and YouTube as well as Bluesky, Mastodon, and Snapchat on Gumroad for a small contribution of CHF19,95.
For more detailed interaction data or tips on how to improve your social media game feel free to contact us info@digitips.ch.
Two weeks ago, Meta’s new social network Threads was finally rolled out to users in the EU, almost six months after launching in the US. Within an hour of the midday launch the European Commission posted a “Hello Europe” in all 23 European languages. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala and Belgium Prime Minister Alexander de Croo became the first EU leaders to post on Threads.
By the end of the day 16 accounts had set up shop on Threads. Two weeks since the introduction of Threads 33 EU leaders, governments and foreign ministries now have a presence on Threads but only half of them are active and have posted their first Thread. The uptake has been somewhat sluggish.
Among the 127 leaders who signed up in summer 2023 only 37 are somewhat active, the vast majority have either been dormant for weeks or haven’t posted anything yet. Some of the biggest world leaders on Instagram such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo, and Ukraine’s Zelensky are still standing on the side lines. While the Princely Palace in Monaco and the Dutch Royal Household have activated their accounts, the British Royal Family isn’t present yet although fan accounts for the royals are proliferating on the platform.
Although many social media managers are unhappy with the changes on X, they are not ready to jump ship just yet. There are several reasons for the sluggish uptake of Threads:
🔵 Despite some users having large follower numbers – automatically imported from Instagram – the number of followers on Threads is only a fraction of their followers on Instagram. 🔵 Despite inspiring first threads, governments tend to share the same content on X and Threads. Some have even started posting screenshots of their posts on X. 🔵 Many social media teams are also waiting for Threads to become available on social media publishing tools such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social so that they can easily schedule their posts on the platform. 🔵 Most governments simply don’t have dedicated community managers to service a new social network, even if it only means cutting and pasting posts from X to Threads. 🔵 Most importantly, the engagement on Threads is far behind that on other platforms.
In a way Threads feels very much like Twitter in the early days, where users are trying to find and engage with new audiences. On the other hand, it also feels like Google+ where users had large artificial audiences but without any meaningful engagement.
Threads is unlikely to replace X for digital diplomacy anytime soon and it is more likely that both platforms will co-exist side by side.
Twitter is dead. The social network that many of us have come to love over the past 17 years is no longer. It was killed by its new owner Elon Musk and renamed X in what might go down in history as one of the most fateful corporate rebranding.
Many social media managers have been put off by the transformation of the platform into a subscription platform over the past year and by the antics of its new owner. But what are the alternatives?
Threads, the social networking platform launched in July 2023 by Meta has seen explosive growth since as it is integrated with Instagram and counted 124 million users. However, the app is only available in 100 countries and has not been rolled out in the European Union yet. The platform could become a serious competitor to X if it increases engagement and builds more functionalities as it is rather basic for the moment. In any case, it is probably wise to set up a Threads account if you haven’t done so yet.
Mastodon is a crowdfunded social media network which was launched in 2016. The decentralized platform has tripled its users since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in November 2022. The 10 million registered users are accessing the network from 10,000 different nodes/servers which makes finding and following other users challenging to say the least. Posts on Mastodon are called “toots” and reposts are called “boosts”. The founder of the platform has vowed to keep Mastodon free, open source and ads-free.
Koo is an Indian social network platform which was released in early 2020 and has grown partly as an alternative to Twitter namely in India, Nigeria, and Brazil. The Bangalore-based network counts 60 million users including official accounts of the governments of Brazil, India, and Nigeria. Its logo is a small yellow bird, and its mission is “to unite the world despite its language barriers”, according to its co-founder Mayank Bidawatka.
Bluesky was born in 2021 as a Twitter spinoff with the aim to build a decentralized social network protocol. The platform, funded in part by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is still in private beta but has grown to 500,000 users. The platform feels very much like Twitter in the early days. The Bluesky team is often requesting user input as they build the platform but has so far refused to onboard large accounts. (If you need an invite, contact us)
T2 Social is a social network started by two former Twitter employees and launched in late April 2023. The platform, which is still in private beta, has only 14,000 users and is growing as each user can invite their friends. Posts are limited to 280 characters, and you can only post pictures but no videos. (If you need an invite, contact us)
Hive promises to “bring back what you used to love about social media in a new way” with “all friends displayed fairly in chronological order”. The app also profited from the Twitter exodus in late 2022 and made headlines for being run by a three-member team managed by 24-year-old founder Kassandra Raluca Pop.
Spill is the most fun and creative platform, launched in June 2023 by two former black Twitter employees. Users spill the tea and sip the tea from people they follow. The brew on the platform is visual-led with pictures, gifs, or videos and 90-character captions. The platform aims to create a safer and more inclusive space compared to traditional social media platforms and caters specifically to the black and queer community. The app is still invite-only but has garnered several hundred thousand users. (If you need an invite, contact us)
Among established platforms LinkedIn has clearly benefitted from Twitter’s slow decline with more governments and organisations becoming active on the professional social network which is approaching the billion-subscriber mark. TikTok, the hugely popular video-sharing platform now offers text-only posts, but the new feature hasn’t been widely adopted yet.
It is unlikely that any of these new platforms will ever replace X. X is not dead, X has become a subscription platform where users need to pay to play. Despite these changes it remains one of the most influential social networks with 350 million subscribers. X is still used by almost all governments in the world and for many international and multilateral organisations X is still the first social media platform listed on their websites.
However, X is no longer the sole actor in the microblogging space which has become fragmented and compartmentalized. The key challenge for social media managers is to build or rebuild an engaged community on these new platforms. One thing is clear, it is important to set up accounts on these channels to protect your brand name and please add them to the boilerplate on your website.
Threads is barely a week old but has taken the internet by storm with more than 100 million users. Among them are 103 heads of state and government and foreign ministers from 53 countries who have switched to the new social media platform.
Latin American leaders are the most popular, occupying six places among the 10 most followed accounts. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele leads the pack with 366,000 followers. Brazil’s President is in second place with 306,000 followers and Colombia’s Petro Gustavo is in third place with 182,000 followers.
Sheik Mohammed, the leader of Dubai is in fourth place with a respectable 174,000 followers but he hasn’t posted any thread yet. Nigeria’s new President Bola Ahmed Tinubu completes the top 5 list of the most followed leaders with 136,000 followers.
The most followed world leaders on Threads and their followers on Instagram (July 13, 2023)
Among the early adopters are 24 presidents, twelve prime ministers and twelve foreign ministers who have switched their personal Instagram profiles to the new platform. Their follower numbers are still low but are rising daily as new users join the platform and many leaders already have millions of followers on Instagram.
Nayib Bukele’s first post on Threads
Nayib Bukele posted a simple wave emoji as his first thread on July 6 and then told his followers: “I love you, but it’s time for you to go to sleep…” Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness posted a video selfie: “Looking forward to making friends and having greater engagement with you. Let’s talk.”
This personal approach seems to work also for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu who posted a challenge to his followers: “Who is worth for me to follow? Someone interesting or funny in all areas of life. I have had enough of politics. I will try to respond from time to time 🎉”
So far, no EU government has adopted the platform since the Threads app is not available in the app store in the EU. While the UK Foreign Office and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly have embraced Threads, no G7 leader has yet established an account on Threads.
The welcome post on Threads from the UK Foreign and Development Office
Most of the 660 Instagram accounts of heads of state and government and foreign ministers are still standing on the side lines, evaluating whether it is worth engaging on yet another social media platform.
