Catholic leader hits 40 million followers on Twitter

The Catholic leader has just reached the 40 million followers mark on Twitter. This was achieved by the combination of all nine of his @Pontifex accounts.

Catholic Herald reports that these accounts, in different languages including Latin, have grown by over 9 million followers in the past 12 months.

Reactions from the Vatican.

The pope himself has not said anything about this achievement, but the Vatican Secretariat for Communication and secretariat’s prefect have both issued statements.

According to the Vatican Secretariat for Communication, these Papal accounts represent the interest and attention of “the people — ordinary people, Christians and non-Christians, political leaders — for the Holy Father’s tweets.

“Every day, through his tweets, Pope Francis makes himself available to men and women through social media, at times offering a spiritual thought. Other times sharing with his followers a reflection on events of great significance for the international community.”

Speaking with the Vatican Radio, the secretariat’s prefect, Monsignor Dario Viganò, added that “the pope takes great care of his social profiles, to such an extent that he closely and carefully checks all the tweets, which are then published.”

She went on to say that these accounts reflect the pope’s concern and “care for relationships” because he knows that the web is “a network not of wires but of people.”

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Other milestones.

Apart from hitting the 40 million Twitter mark, Pope Francis has also made some pretty remarkable lists.

Twiplomacy.com, which ranks world leaders’ impact on the social media platform, reports that the Pope is the second most followed world leader of 2017. The first is Donald Trump @realDonaldTrump, in case you were wondering.

He is also the third most influential world leader with 41,000 tweets and retweets. Once again, he falls behind the U.S. president, who has almost 80K tweets and retweets.

Finally, the Pontiff is the third most interactive world leader with 14M interactions while the president is the first with 196M.

Instagram is not left out.

Twitter is not the only place that is being dominated by the Pontiff.

His official account, @franciscus, is very close to hitting 5M followers. Currently, it is at 4.9M followers with 461 posts.

This is very impressive when you consider the fact that the Pope just joined the social network last year.

The Pontiff (born Jorge Mario Bergoglio on 17 December 1936) became the Pope in 2013 at the age of 76. His predecessor was Benedict XVI.