Costa Rica

Laura Chinchilla is one of the chattiest world leaders with 60% of her tweets being @replies to her followers. She used her account effectively to engage with her community in the run-up to the February 2010 elections and even after winning the presidency she continues to take time to personally answer questions from her followers. The President of Costa Rica also engages with her peers @mentioning the presidents of Colombia, Guatemala and Panama, who she is following mutually. Her most popular tweet is “A salute to all the women in the world from a country where mothers celebrate life by never having to see their children go to war” in reference to Costa Rica, which is one of the few countries not to have an army.

The institutional account of the Costa Rican presidency is extremely active, with over 10,000 tweets sent since 17 May 2010. The account is among the three most active accounts among world leaders with an average of over 33 tweets a day. The account tweets news stories, press releases and the daily activities of the president, the vice president and ministers, consistently @mentioning their Twitter handles. The account uses Instagram and live tweets key speeches and uses Storify to summarize the social media conversations.

A specific campaign account for Laura Chinchilla was set up around the same time as her personal Twitter account in January 2009. The account was active until October 2010, broadcasting the daily activities of Laura Chinchilla using mainly TwitPic and livestreaming via Ustream. The account is entirely dedicated to the activities of Laura Chinchilla, mentioning her Twitter handle @Laura_Ch in every second tweet. The account briefly resumed its activity in May 2012.