PM hits 1M Twitter followers

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a million-follower man.

The politician now has more than 1 million followers on Twitter, a popular social networking platform that boasts about 10 million users in Canada.

Trudeau is likely the first Canadian politician to meet that mark; his predecessor Stephen Harper fell just short with 936,000 followers, while former political opponent Thomas Mulcair has about 200,000.

Trudeau’s Twitter star really took off during the election.

By the beginning of the campaign this August, the Liberal leader had an audience of about 681,000 followers.

On Election Day alone, Trudeau gained 40,000 followers.

Trudeau can now count himself among the Twitter-verse’s heaviest-hitting world leaders.

But his meteoric rise on social me- dia is tempered by the outsized followings of his political peers.

With 66 million followers, Obama has the largest audience of any politico.

(Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi comes next, at 16 million, and Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, follows with 4.2 million.)

While Obama has admitted that he’s a BlackBerry addict, he hasn’t always been so plugged in. Although his account was active in 2007, he told a group of Chinese students he had never used Twitter, himself.

It wasn’t until his 2012 re-election campaign that Obama began crafting more of the tweets personally, and when the message came directly from him, he signs off with his initials “-bo.”

Trudeau’s account says upfront that tweets are written by staff and by him, although it remains to be seen whether he’ll develop his own signature sign-off.