Pope Francis Becomes Global Twitter Star Among World Leaders

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 5, 6:27AM EDT

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It did not take long for Pope Francis to rise to the top of Twitter followers among the world’s leaders. By at least one measure, he has passed even President Obama.

The new pope has 8 million followers on Twitter, which puts him behind the president, who has 34.6 million. When the measurement moves to retweets (per tweet by RT), Pope Francis has more than 20,000. Following him by this yardstick are the Dalai Lama with 3,000 and President Obama at 2,500.

For some reason, the top of the list also includes many leaders of Latin American nations — Argentina, Columbia, Mexico and Brazil.

All the data for these measurements come from Reputation Metrics and were taken as of late July.

Pope Francis still has a long way to go in terms of total followers among all people on Twitter. Justin Bieber tops that list with 42.6 million, followed by Katy Perry with 40.3 million and Lady Gaga at 39.5.

The pope may have run up through the charts quickly, but he probably never will break into the level of the entertainment crowd. Twitter, after all, appears to be a medium of the young.

By the way, for those who want to follow the pope, he is @Pontifex.

Methodology: The data collected by the Twiplomacy study were prepared by the consulting firm Burson-Marsteller.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.