Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari has been ranked the 14th most influential leader on social networks in 2016.

President Muhammadu Buhari (@MBuhari) with a twitter following of 562,000, 184,000 Facebook likes and 49,000 followings on Instagram was ranked ahead of 36 other world leaders by the Burson-Marsteller’s 2016 Twiplomacy study.

The ranking named Burson-Marsteller twiplomacy, refers to the use of Twitter and other social media sites by government agencies and officials to engage with the public, disperse information and even leverage global influence.

It looks at how Head of states and Government, Foreign Ministers and International organistions use social media channels.

Aside ranking 14th in the world, the @NgrPresident account which is the official account of Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s president was also ranked 38 in the world.

@Magufulijp and @alsisiofficial, the twitter account of John Magufuli of Tanzania and Abdel Fatah elsisi of Egypt respectively are the only two African countries who made the list of the 50 World leaders. They are ranked 36 and 43 respectively.

Other social media accounts ranked include that of the President of the United States, (@POTUS) which was ranked Number 1 as well as King Salman (@KingSalam) of Saudi Arabia ranked number 2.

Pope Francis (@Pontifex) is ranked number 3, Barack Obama (@barackobama) in his personal capacity was ranked number 7, while the Saudi Foreign Ministry (@ksamofa) was ranked number 50.

A statement on the ranking posted by the organisation said it identified 793 Twitter accounts of heads of state and government, foreign ministers and their institutions in 173 countries worldwide.

“The study analyzes each leader’s Twitter profiles, tweet history, and their connections with each other.”

“Data was collected on May 1, 2016 using Burson-Marsteller’s proprietary Burson Tools to analyze the 628,000 possible Twitter connections between world leaders. Other variables considered included: tweets, following, followers, the date the user joined Twitter, tweets/day, retweets, percent of retweets, @replies, percent of @replies, tweets retweeted, average number of tweets retweeted.”

“Burson-Marsteller looked at each account to see if it has a header picture, if the account is dormant, active or protected and if the world leader tweets personally. We checked the language the account tweets and checked for the presence of Twitter lists.”