Top 10 Rankings 2015

Research Note: World Leader Rankings on Twitter December 2015 5 #2 Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India with nearly 17M followers is firmly rooted to the second spot, having more than doubled his followers within a year! He is also the third most-followed person on Twitter in India after Bollywood superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan. In 2014, Modi used Twitter extensively in his diplomatic efforts to reach out to Fortune500 CEOs, thus giving impetus to his #makeinindia campaign. Even though he continued to receive flak from Twitterati for his frequent trips to countries such as Seychelles, Mongolia, Mauritius, US, UK, UAE and China, he managed to generate positive chatter with his continuous engagement with world leaders and CEOs so much so that his May 2015 selfie with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang was considered the most-powerful selfie in the world. The photo was shared over 5000 times on Twitter and it registered 31.85 million hits on the Chinese micro-blogging site, Weibo. From congratulating the Indian cricket team to promoting his pet campaign #SelfieWithDaughter that took Twitterati by storm, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the most talked about person on Twitter in India, according to data compiled by social media analytics firm Blueocean Market Intelligence. #3 President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey held on to the #3 spot even as he amassed 7.5 M followers and continued his love-hate relationship with Twitter. In Oct 2015, a court in Turkey issued an arrest warrant on Friday for the editor-in-chief of the English-language newspaper Today's Zaman on charges of defaming President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Twitter. On the same day, another Turkish journalist, Necati Doğru, was convicted of insulting Erdoğan and sentenced to 11 months and 20 days in prison. Previously the President had compared social media to the “murderer’s knife”, proudly declared he does not “tweet or schmeet” and overseen blanket bans on Twitter. In fact his government had blocked Twitter and YouTube in March 2014 after they were used to spread a torrent of audio recordings implicating the prime minister and his inner circle in an alleged corruption scandal. The ban on social media was however later overturned by the country’s top constitutional court.

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