Brazil

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is the perfect example of how world leaders discover Twitter during their election campaign and then abandoning their followers once elected. Her “Twitter adventure” as she termed it in her first tweet started in April 2010 and lasted until December 13 of that same year. When she was elected in November 2010 she had 200,000 followers, today she has over 1.4 million followers and is among the top 10 most followed world leaders although she hasn’t tweeted since. Her last tweet which has been re-tweeted over 4200 times reads: “Happy to have been the Twitter sensation of 2010. Hoping to have more time to be here [on Twitter] with you. Let’s talk more in 2011.” Her followers are still waiting for the rest of the discussion… Dilma Rousseff doesn’t follow any peer but she is followed by 17 peers, mostly from Latin America.

The institutional account of the Brazilian presidency is one of the most prolific accounts on Twitter with over 8,500 tweets since April 2010, ie over 8 times/day. The Twitter stream is a non-descript governmental newsfeed, tweeting the news of the day, as well as the president’s daily agenda and pictures of Dilma Rousseff’s appearances. The most re-tweeted tweet is the apology for a rogue retweet in January 2012: “We apologize to everyone for the unauthorized publication of an undue humorous retweet”. The author of the tweet apparently confused his personal account with the official administration account and has resigned after the episode. The presidential account follows the @WhiteHouse, but ignores the @Elysee and the Presidency of Uruguay @scpresidenciauy.