United Kingdom

Buckingham Palace is extremely active on Twitter with more than 12 tweets a day. Updates are mainly on royal family engagements, announcements, installations, royal visits, royal tours, photos from royal events and videos of the changing of the guards, etc. Its 350,000+ followers demonstrate a keen following for the monarchy, however there is hardly any engagement on the channel. Interestingly enough the Queen only follows two accounts, namely @ClarenceHouse, residence of Prince Charles and Prince William and the historic tweets of @QueenVictoriaRI, but she ignores any other world leader including her own Prime Ministers in the UK, Australia, Canada and other dominions.

The official account of the UK Prime Minister passed the 2 million follower mark at the end of May 2012 and is the 5th most followed account among world leaders. The UK Prime Minister follows over 378,000 people, the result of an automatic follow policy which has since been discontinued. 1 out of 5 tweets are retweets of other UK bodies such as the @ForeignOffice (84), @UKParliament (68), the @DFID_UK (49), @HMTreasury (43), the @CabinetOfficeUK (37) and the @UKHomeOffice (30). David Cameron who once said: "The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it – too many twits might make a tw*t." hasn’t sent or signed a single tweet. While 10% of the PM’s tweets are @replies it is interesting to note that David Cameron is much less conversational than his predecessor with only 50 odd @replies. Gordon Brown’s digital communications team sent 350 @replies including this apology to @ibelittle “Sorry, sorry and sorry again. My brain is frazzled.”