Saudi monarch is king of Twitter with more retweets than Trump

He may not tweet often but when he does, King Salman's words spread like wildfire.

King Salman of Saudi Arabia, US president Donald Trump and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi at a Global Centre for Combatting Extremist Ideology in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on May 21, 2017  during Mr Trump's first overseas trip  as president. Photo: Saudi Press Agency via AP
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GENEVA // Donald Trump may be lighting up Twitter with strange new words and attacks on allies but in the battle for most attention per tweet the US president is losing.

The world leader whose original tweets generate the most retweets is Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, according to the latest “Twiplomacy” study by the communications firm Burson-Marsteller.

In terms of output, there is no contest: the Saudi king only tweeted 10 times during the period covered by the study — April 2016 to May 20 of this year.

But those 10 tweets were each retweeted more than 147,000 times on average, dwarfing Mr Trump’s 13,100 average retweets per tweet, said the study.

“He (King Salman) posts exclusively in Arabic and without any visuals, but every tweet is a digital home run,” said the report, which was based on analysis of 856 official and personal Twitter accounts of leaders in 178 countries.

Retweets are only one measure of influence on the social media platform and Trump is gaining ground elsewhere.

With the internet poking fun at his use of the word “covfefe” in a post on Wednesday, which followed his assertion on Twitter that US-German trade was “very bad” for Americans, the report found that @realDonaldTrump could be the most followed world leader account by August.

Pope Francis is currently in the lead with a combined 33,716,301 followers over his nine language accounts.

President Trump lags behind by about 3.5 million followers but his account has grown by 5.7 per cent per month during the US election and the start of his presidency, putting him on track to overtake the pontiff, the report said.

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi is in third place with 30,058,659 followers.

For all of the news that Mr Trump has generated on Twitter, Burson-Marsteller found that other leaders rarely engage with him on the platform.

Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto, Marshall Islands leader Hilda Heine and Puerto Rico’s governor Ricky Rossello are the only three who have directly addressed @realDonaldTrump.

However, the report notes that the pope and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau have however engaged with Trump via subtweets, a form of posting typically used for criticism.

* Agence France-Presse