President William Ruto has been named the most influential African leader on Twitter, according to a report released on Wednesday by a global communications agency, BCW twiplomacy.
The President also emerged as 13 of the 50 most influential world leaders.
He marked a plus nine rank change this year, having emerged as number 22 in the world leaders list of 2021.
Further, he was ranked third in the new world leaders rank.
South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa was ranked second, taking number 18 in the world leaders list, followed by Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, who emerged 29th in the overall list.
BCW's report is based on data collected between October 1, 2021, and September 30, 2022, that does not include leaders who left office before the end of the period, which excludes former president Uhuru Kenyatta.
"The list includes leaders of UN-recognised states with executive power who were in office as of September 30, 2022. They are also on Twitter with a handle that belongs to an individual, whether by name or job title, but not an office," BCW said.
Further, the agency used a bespoke algorithm to rank, which examines the trends shaping digital diplomacy on Twitter in 2022.
BCW said the algorithm assigned a tailored weighting to variables, including mentions, tweets, retweets, reach, impressions, follower changes, likes and follower count.
Other variables included gender, age, length of time in office, year-on-year comparison and the proportion of tweets with either photo or video content.
They were added to variables related to the leader's country of origin, including country GDP per capita, internet penetration, income level based on the World Bank’s categorisation of the country, population size and languages of tweets (English, French, Spanish, Arabic).
