Pope Francis retweeted more than any world leader

Pope Francis is streets ahead of any world leader on Twitter because he is so widely re-tweeted.

With 14m followers for the nine language versions of his @Pontifex account, the cyber-savvy pontiff has just a third of US president Barack Obama’s followers.

However, that is not the key measure, said Matthias Lüfkens, who oversees the annual Twiplomacy survey.

“It’s not the number of followers which is really important, but the reach, the engagement,” he said.

The real benchmark is the number of tweets retweeted by followers to their own network.

How I wish everyone had decent work! It is essential for human dignity.

— Pope Francis – ARCHIVE (@Pontifex266Arch) June 24, 2014

Pope Francis wins hands down, with his Spanish-language tweets being retweeted more than 10,000 times on average and his English-language tweets more than 6,400 times.

Obama’s 2012 election victory tweet — a photo of him embracing first lady Michelle Obama and the words “Four more years” — was retweeted a massive 806,066 times.

On average, @BarackObama gets 1,400 retweets. The account is run by his political campaign staff.