Malaysia

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak actively engages with his audience. He tweets personally and engages his half a million followers with quizzes and sweepstakes. In May 2012 he asked his followers what gift he should give to his 500,000th follower. A couple of days later he invited four of his followers for breakfast, a scene which he immortalized with a Twitpic and a YouTube video of his guests. Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak started to tweet on 23 September 2008, a day after he “Officially assumed duties as Minister of Finance”. 17% of his tweets are conversational and include @replies. He is following a number of international and regional leaders and is mutually connected with @bluehousekorea, @karimmassimov_e and @number10gov.

The Twitter account of the Prime Minister’s press office has been dormant since 9 March 2012. Until its demise the account was tweeting on average twice a day in English and in Malay, mainly government decisions and planned budget expenditures.

The government has an automated Twitter newsfeed @myGovPortal which provides daily news updates from Bernama, the state news agency, on important inter-ethnic, state administration and governance, employment and development cooperation issues. It usually provides links to the website of the Prime Minister (http://www.pmo.gov.my). The news feed seems to be broken as it generally tweets the news items twice. Obviously, interaction with followers is practically non-existent with no retweets, @mentions, hashtags etc.