President Ruto Named Africa's Most Influential Leader on Twitter

President William Ruto has been named the most influential African leader on Twitter in 2022.

This is according to the 2022 Twiplomacy World Leader Power Ranking report released on Wednesday, December 7.

President Ruto ranked 13th worldwide, which was an improvement of 9 spots after being ranked 22 worldwide in 2021. 

The Twiplomacy report ranked India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the most influential worl leader on Twitter and was closely followed by US President Joe Biden.

In Africa, President Ruto was closely followed by his South Africa counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, as Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, came in third.

According to Twiplomacy, the data used to produce the ranking was taken between October 1, 2021 and September 30, 2022, and does not include those who have left office prior to the end of that period. 

Twiplomacy is a platform by Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW) Global that tracks the growth of digital diplomacy.

In the ranking, Twiplomacy stated that it used a method designed by BCW that assigns a tailored weighting to specific variables.

"Given a specified time interval and list of Twitter handles, the algorithm assigns a tailored weighting to variables including mentions, tweets, retweets, reach, impressions, follower changes, likes and follower count. We then display this as an ascending order ranking," Twiplomacy stated.

Additional variables applied in the ranking include gender, age, length of time in office, year-on-year comparison, and the proportion of tweets with either photo or video content.

President Ruto has 5.6 million followers on Twitter.