Which European leaders made the most impact on social media in 2019?
Social media can win or lose an election, can make or break a politician - and can give us a good idea of who the most popular votewinners are. Here, we look at the big hits of 2019.
Most-liked individual Facebook posts
If Facebook is, like politics, a popularity contest, there’s no doubt that Giuseppe Conte bossed it this year. According to research using Crowdtangle of the posts from Europe’s political leaders from 1 January to 27 December, Italian Prime Minister Conte racked up 23 of the top 30 individual posts which collected the most likes.
Top of the lot, with 309,150 likes, was Conte’s blistering open letter on 15 August to his coalition partner Matteo Salvini, whom he accused of “disloyalty” and being “obsessed with blocking immigration.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the coalition collapsed within a week.
But it’s not all business with European politics’ favorite Facebooker. A 9 June picture of Conte relaxing with two puppies in a garden scored 76,000 likes, which is more than any other leader’s posts got before December.
The only other post gathering six-figure likes was UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “Thank you Britain” photograph, from the morning after the 12 December election. An apparently impromptu double thumbs-up taken in an anonymous corridor in front of a humble recycling bin, it nevertheless gained 129,955 likes by capturing the mood of the victorious Conservatives and their newly-swollen following.
The next politician to surface among Conte’s one-man domination of Facebook 2019 is Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, whose festive family photo posted on 24 December gained 71,128 likes - the seventh-most popular post overall.
Emmanuel Macron just about squeaks into the top 30 with some Facebook catnip: a video of a bloke on a hoverboard carrying a rifle, posted on Bastille Day and captioned “Proud of our army, modern and innovative”. That gained 490,598 likes.
Rounding off the top five political posters is Sebastian Kurz, the alarmingly young Austrian Chancellor ousted in a no-confidence vote in May after his coalition partners were embroiled in scandal. His impassioned post on the subject gained 37,462 likes, and he remains well-liked at the ballot box too: his OVP party won the most votes at the subsequent election and he is expected to form a new government soon.
Most Facebook interactions
Not everything on Facebook is about likes. Politicians, particularly, may wish to provoke amazement, amusement, fury, despondency or devotion - or, as reduced to Facebook reaction emojis: Wow, Haha, Angry, Sad and Love.
Across the whole of 2019, Giuseppe Conte collected the most Wows among European leaders, inspiring 33,143 astonishment emojis. (He also topped the list for Angry with 103,453 and Love with 936,942.) Emmanuel Macron gathered the most Sad emojis - 122,277 - and Boris Johnson provoked the most laughs, with 161,609.
In terms of reactions as a whole, Conte topped the list with 8.6 million, with Johnson (6.8 million) his only real challenger. Orban totalled 2.5 million, Czech PM Andrej Babis 2.1 million (his amusement-emoji total of 128,219 was the only non-Johnson six-figure Haha haul) and Kurz 1.9 million.
Most Twitter followers
Moving over from Facebook to Twitter changes the picture significantly. No longer is social media the sole domain of Giuseppe Conte, whose Twitter following is a comparatively small 307,600 - seventh-highest in our sample.
Instead, Twitter belongs to Emmanuel Macron, whose 4.4 million following is more than three times his nearest competitor - Boris Johnson, on 1.4 million. Also toting seven-figure followings are Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez (1.1 million) and Dutch PM Mark Rutte (a nice round one million according to Twitter’s own, annoyingly-rounded figures). Czech PM Andrej Babis (379,800) fills out the top five.
Top tweets of 2019
200,984 of Emmanuel Macron's 4.4 million followers liked the French PM's emotional tweet following the Notre-Dame cathedral fire. This was enough for him to take top spot in 2019 by a substantial margin.
In second came Boris Johnson as his simple but effective Christmas wishes to the families of all of his 1.4 million followers was liked by 66,380 people.
Next up was Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez, whose post back in February, recognised Juan Guaidó as the new interim president of Venezuela following former President Nicolas Maduro's failure to call an election. That despite a number of European countries calling for him to do so in order to help save the South American country from a humanitarian crisis. This was liked by 48,003 of his 1.1 million followers and was good enough to give him third spot in our list.
Fourth on the list was Portugual's Antonio Costa who's congratulations message to Newly elected Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi was liked by 22,856 of his 101,300 followers.
Last but no means least was Sebastien Kurz, who followed Pedro Sanchez in recognizing Juan Guaidó as the new interim president of Venezuela. His tweet was liked by 10,718 of his followers, a massive 190,276 behind the top tweet of the year from Macron.
Originally published by CGTN Europe, 28 Dec 2019. ‘Top tweets’ section written by AJ Wood.
