International Organizations on Social Media 2026
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.
UNOCHA’s Tom Fletcher, UNEP’s Inger Andersen, WHO’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and ESA’s Josef Aschbacher complete the Top5 list and have enjoyed double digit growth through regular engagement on the platform.
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.
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.
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%.
As on Instagram, the World Health Organization leads the rankings ahead of UNICEF, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum. The European Space Agency (ESA) has edged Greenpeace out of fifth place.
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.
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.
The pages of the UN Youth Office, the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies and the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) have registered the strongest growth, between 87% and 43% over the past year. The account of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) grew again by 29% reaching 1,135,989 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 Voices program, 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 World Health Organization (WHO) is leading the TikTok rankings with 4.6 million followers. The International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) is in second place with 3.1 million followers on their “We are humanitarians” channel.
The International Organization for Migration, the World Economic Forum, the UNHCR and the World Food Programme (WFP) all have more than a 1.4 million followers while the median average of the 71 accounts stands at a median average of only 6,723 followers per channel.
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.
While some organizations namely the UN, Human Rights Watch and the World Economic Forum keep shedding followers, others such as the International Criminal Court, the United Nations office in Geneva and the UN Environment Programme have been able to double and even triple their follower numbers.
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.
Meta’s messaging platform WhatsApp continues to attract international organizations: 37 organizations have set up channels on WhatsApp up from 29 a year ago.
The World Health Organization leads the WhatsApp rankings with a whopping 6.9 million followers and UNICEF is in second position with 5 million followers. The World Economic Forum, UNESCO and the World Food Programme complete the Top 5 list of the most followed organizations with over a million followers.
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.
The full data sets are available here: https://luefkens.gumroad.com/l/IntOrgSocialMedia2026
Geneva
18.09.2026
