President or Pontiff: Who’s Got More Twitter Sway?

By Whitney Teal

He may enact any laws, but Pope Francis has more power than President Barack Obama—on Twitter, that is.

A look at the Twitter profiles of 505 world leaders in 153 country by Twiplomacy found that @Pontifex, an account created in December, is the most retweeted of the group. The official twitter account for the Pope has eight international editions and averages more than 8,000 retweets per tweet sent for the English-language account alone.

@BarackObama, the official Twitter account of President Obama, trails with a relatively measly 2,390 retweets per tweet. Obama’s account is less engaged, but more popular, with some 34 million followers to the Pope’s 2 million English-speaking followers. (Across the nine editions, though, Pope Francis reaches more than 7 million followers.)

Consolation: The president’s election night tweet, “Four more years,” is Twitter’s most retweeted update of all time, according to MediaBistro’s All Twitter blog. Sent at 8:16 p.m. on Nov. 6, 2012 and paired with a photo of the president hugging First Lady Michelle Obama, it garnered an astonishing 797,572 retweets and 298,947 favorites.