The social media loser.

U.S. president loves Twitter, but he lags behind other leaders

Donald Trump might have been surprised to learn this week that he is not the world’s most popular leader on social media.

A newly released study of world leaders on Instagram revealed that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is more popular than Trump on the picture-sharing social network.

Modi has 6.8 million followers on Instagram; Trump has 6.3 million.

And despite Trump’s fondness for governing in tweets, Modi also has more Twitter followers: 29 million, compared with Trump’s 27.8 million.

So if Trump is looking to pick a fight for worldwide dominance of social media, he would have to be ready to take on India’s leader.

Not only does Modi have more followers than Trump, but he also engages more with people on Instagram.

Moreover, even though Modi has posted far fewer photos than the new U.S. president, each of them has received about double the number of comments and likes.

At the time this column was written, White House spokesperson Sean Spicer had yet to dispute the numbers or present “alternative facts” on Trump’s second-place standing to Modi. Nor was there any word on Trump’s reaction to the fact that neither he nor Modi come anywhere close to the 13.8 million followers that former president Barack Obama has on Instagram.

The findings are contained in a huge study by the international public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller, which analyzed 325 Instagram accounts by world leaders and foreign ministers, representing about three quarters of the member countries in the United Nations.

Combined, these politicians’ accounts have attracted nearly 50 million followers worldwide and, over the past year alone, have generated more than 60,000 posts.

Here in Canada, people have been getting used to the idea of Justin Trudeau as an international celebrity on social media. His fans love that reputation. His critics call him the “selfie prime minister.”

On Wednesday, girls’-education advocate Malala Yousafzai even joked about Trudeau’s international star power when she was getting her honorary citizenship on Parliament Hill.

“When I was coming here, everyone was telling me, like, ‘Shake the prime minister’s hand and let us know how he looks in reality,’ ” Yousafzai said.

In the report on this study, written up at the Twiplomacy blog site, Trudeau is described as “somewhat of a social media darling” and his Instagram account tagged as one worth following.

Trudeau’s Instagram posts tend to get on average 21,000 interactions, according to the study.

Yet Trudeau doesn’t crack the top-10 list of world leaders on Instagram.

With roughly 1.1 million followers, Canada’s Prime Minister is well behind people such as Queen Rania of Jordan, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and just behind Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The report dubs accounts “worth following” if the leaders use their Instagram posts to be creative, candid or authentic. Compared with some other world leaders on this measure, Trudeau is actually more formal or staged than some of his counterparts.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen gets a nod in the report for managing his account himself, “sometimes sharing selfies from meetings and personal snapshots of his weekend activities, be it cycling with friends or grilling asparagus on his BBQ.” Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is called “one of the most entertaining and engaging world leaders” on Instagram, for his multiple selfies and a running #GuessWhere series of riddles posted along with his pictures.

When it comes to creativity, Trump comes across in this analysis as a politician who doesn’t entirely “get” Instagram. He often uses the network to post photographs of his tweets, the report says, and the official White House account has actually been losing followers since Obama departed. “The Trump White House has yet to make an impact on Instagram,” the Burson-Marsteller report states. “Most of the 33 pictures shared on the account are group pictures of advisers and delegations surrounding President Donald Trump when signing orders. The most liked and commented picture of the Trump White House is a picture of the empty Oval Office which has received its fair shares of negative comments from his critics.”

If Trump is interested in building his Instagram following, the report gives a few hints.

Posing with sports teams or sport regalia is popular — one of Trudeau’s more successful posts in 2016 showed him wearing Canadian Olympic medals. Family photos are also a good idea. The most-liked video in the whole survey, watched 1.7 million times after her father recirculated it, was an Ivanka Trump video, featuring her playing with her son Theodore in the White House.

Trump has other things on his mind this week, so he probably hasn’t heard the news that he’s lagging behind India’s prime minister on Instagram and Twitter.

Maybe that’s for the best: Does the social-media world really need more Trump? sdelacourt@bell.net

When it comes to creativity, Trump comes across in this analysis as a politician who doesn’t entirely “get” Instagram