Even though he was just elected a week ago, Pope Francis’ Twitter account has already acquired two million followers – and that’s just for the English version!
Newsmax is reporting that Pope Francis took control of the @Pontifex Twitter account established by his predecessor, Benedict XVI. He hasn’t had much time to tweet, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the 3.98 million followers he has amassed among his nine multi-lingual Twitter pages. And those numbers are probably already out of date because his accounts are averaging 200,000 new followers a day.
“It’s a global church, and the Twitter followers are starting to reflect that. Clearly we expect to see a bit of a jump with Pope Francis, and not only in Spanish,” Vatican communications strategist Greg Burke told USA Today. “I can’t wait until @Pontifex in Spanish passes up the English. Latin America is where we have to get the message out, and Pope Francis can do that.”
But it might take a little work. According to Spain’s Cervantes Institute, even though Spanish is the second most used language on Twitter, a staggering 60 percent of Latin Americans are not on the Web.
Thus far, Pope Francis’ tweets have been sparse, but his first official message, sent on the day of his election, had 31,346 retweets in English and another 30,532 in Spanish within 24 hours.
His second tweet, sent on the day of his installation and reading “True power is service. The Pope must serve all people, especially the poor, the weak, the vulnerable” quickly amassed 21,937 followers in English and another 23,853 in Spanish.
Sean Hudgins, a social media intern for Pope Francis who attends Villanova University, said he expects the new pope to tweet much more often than Benedict.
“We’re hoping it becomes even more frequent than what Benedict had before,” he said. “Benedict’s [tweets] were kind of sparse, and I think a lot of people want to see with this Twitter how to be more connected to the people, and I think Pope Francis, that’s something that his brand is — to be more of a people person. So we’re hopeful these tweets will be that.”
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