Shaikh Mohammad gained more than one
million followers in a year
Dubai: His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al
Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, is
among the top 10 out of the 123 heads of state who use Twitter for citizen
engagement, a new study revealed.
The study, World Leaders on Twitter Ranking Report, was
conducted in December 2012 by the US Digital Policy Council (DPC), an
international think tank group that promotes good governance and policy-making.
The report analysed the social media presence, particularly on Twitter, of 123
out of the 164 world leaders.
“In 2012, His Highness Shaikh Mohammad gained 910,000
followers in just one year to have 1.3 million followers now. He regularly
shared his thoughts, future plans, attended events and various achievements
with citizens and followers,” the report read.
Shaikh Mohammad, who started using Twitter in 2009, had
351,817 followers in DPC’s report in 2010. This number increased to 445,725 by
2011, and has more than doubled to 1.3 million in just three years.
“The fact that
Shaikh Mohammad has embraced social media is very progressive. For leaders
wanting to reach out to their population, which in the Middle East is
predominantly young people, social media is the best platform to use,” a top
official at a leading social media specialist agency in Dubai, told Gulf News.
“It’s a fantastic record. It’s not easy to grow your
followers. For him to continually gain followers, that means people are interested,
and remain interested in what he is doing. That’s a good sign of popularity,”
the official added.
The more than 1,200 tweets of Shaikh Mohammad touch upon
issues that are close to people’s worries and concerns – both UAE nationals and
expatriates. Through his Twitter page, he shares his aspirations, vision, and
even felicitations on different national and social occasions related to
economic, social, and cultural issues.
Shaikh Mohammad also uses his page to inform his
followers personally about his official and non-official activities, focusing
on his impressions and the outputs of these activities, which is a positive
thing according to Menar Media. “It [using social media] gives a leader, a
popular person, much more of a human element and that is a good thing.”
Last year, Shaikh Mohammad’s Twitter account saw an
unprecedented activities where he launched a raft of humanitarian initiatives,
the latest of them was his instructions to the concerned authorities not to
make any celebrations for the Accession Day on January 4.
“In the last two years, we highlighted key segments of
the community that deserve our gratitude and attention such as orphaned
children and mothers. This year, we focus on a new group: general labour
employees such as gardeners, janitors, construction workers, domestic workers
among others. These groups play an active role in society,” Shaikh Mohammad
said when he launched the community-driven initiative through his Twitter
account. He also launched the ‘’Union Tree’’ initiative through his Twitter
page.
This year, DPC noted a tremendous growth in the number of
governments embracing social media. For its first report in 2010, as many as 33
world leaders or one in five used Twitter. Two years later, the number has
increased to 123 which means three out of four heads of state currently use
Twitter to interact with people.
Based on the 2012 study, US President Barack Obama is by
far the most “followed” world leader on Twitter, with 25 million followers.
- With additional inputs from WAM
Source: Gulf News
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