France

François Hollande has been sending 21 tweets/day on average during the election campaign. However since 18 May 2012 the personal account of the French President has gone silent. His last tweet is a #FollowFriday for the @Elysee palace, the French presidency’s official account. Hollande has never sent or signed a tweet himself contrary to his partner @ValTrier who has been making headlines with her personal tweets. The @FHollande account is a campaign account used mainly to promote his campaign with the hashtag #FH2012 used 2,250 times in almost every second tweet. The new French President is not yet well connected on Twitter. He only follows Barack Obama who doesn’t follow him back and ignores the 7 other world leaders who follow him unilaterally.

The Elysée Palace has been active on Twitter since April 2010 tweeting the agenda of the French President as the first tweet summed it up. The Elysée is using foursquare to plot the location of the President and has live tweeted key speeches of former president Sarkozy. The Elysée uses almost 2 hashtags in each tweet with the most mentioned being former president #Sarkozy (1,490) followed by Libya, G20 and G8. The Elysée Palace has tried to stay neutral during the election campaign in 2012 neither following @FHollande nor @NicolasSarkozy. Under the new French President the account has become a tad more formal only referring to François Hollande as Monsieur le President de la Republique. The account is well connected with other world leaders following 6 of them mutually.

His home town Nantes and François Hollande largely dominate the Twitter stream of French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. The former mayor of Nantes initially posted his tweets from Facebook before switching to Tweetdeck and Twitter for iPhone. Occasionally he replies directly to his followers but most of his tweets are announcements about his upcoming TV, radio and campaign appearances. Jean-Marc Ayrault is not yet known on the international scene. He is only followed by Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and mutually follows his mentor François Hollande. He tweets on average 3 times a day but his account has seen some important spikes during the election campaign. The account has gone quite since he was nominated Prime Minister on 15 May 2012 only tweeting once in early July 2012 asking his followers to follow his general policy speech on the @Matignon Twitter account.

The institutional Twitter account of the French Prime Minister’s office named after the Hôtel Matignon, the official residence of the Prime Minister of France was only set up on 2 July 2012. The account started to live tweet Prime Minister’s Ayrault’s first major address to parliament the following day. The @Matignon account is following only 39 people, namely the 39 ministers of his government who have an active Twitter account.