A closer look the most popular – and most active – Latin American presidents on Twitter.

BY LATINVEX STAFF

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez continues to be the most popular Latin American president on Twitter in terms of number of followers. The least popular? Mauricio Funes from El Salvador, according to a Latinvex analysis.

Meanwhile, in number of tweets, Danilo Medina from the Dominican Republic outperforms.

Chavez has more than 3 million followers on Twitter. That compares with 2 million for Felipe Calderon of Mexico, the second-most popular president.

Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff has 1.6 million followers.

Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner and Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos round out the top five, with 1.24 and 1.18 million followers, respectively.

Funes only has 3,889 followers. Another major laggard is Porfirio Lobo Sosa of Honduras, with 5,547 followers.

Neither Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua nor Jose Mujica of Uruguay have personal Twitter accounts. Meanwhile, Evo Morales of Bolivia appears to have several ones, although several seem to be outdated and little used. As a result they were not included in our analysis.

TWEET CHAMPION

Although Chavez is known as an active Twitter user –often using the social medium to make key announcements – he’s not the most active Latin American president. That honor goes to Danilo Medina, who was sworn in as president of the Dominican Republic last week.

Most of his 6,107 tweets were clearly posted before he became president, but he will likely continue posting actively during his four-year mandate, giving him an edge over Latin America’s other presidents.

The second-most active tweeter is Haiti’s Michel Martelly, with  3,742 tweets. 

Juan Manuel Santos is another active tweeter, posting 3,447 tweets.

Rounding out the top five tweeters are Calderon and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, with 2,679 and 2,308 tweets, respectively.

The least active president? Funes again, with only five tweets. Lobo again follows, with 96 tweets.

In fact, the three presidents with fewest followers (Funes, Lobo and Castro) are also the same three with fewest tweets, showing the general trend linking number of tweets to followers. However, clearly Chavez and Medina each are the exception to that.

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