Many leaders in business, entertainment, and religion use Twitter to send messages to followers in ‘tweets’ of 140 characters or less. Now Pope Benedict XVI, the 85-year-old leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has joined Twitter, too. The pope has Twitter accounts in eight languages, with his English one under the name @Pontifex.


The pope took several days to send his first tweet after joining the social media site, generating speculation (on Twitter, of course) about what his inaugural statement might be. Finally, on Dec. 12, he tweeted “Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.” That tweet prompted more than 60,000 “re-tweets” by the English account’s followers alone, which already number more than 1.1 million.


According to The New York Times, religious leaders often command proportionately greater influence on Twitter than their numbers might indicate. Entertainers such as Lady Gaga (32 million) and Justin Bieber (31 million) may have many more followers, but pastors and Christian media figures such as Joyce Meyer (1.5 million), Rick Warren (812,000), and John Piper (395,000) often receive far more Twitter traffic—as much as 30 times more—through re-tweets and other ways of sharing content. Twitter is well aware of this fact, and they have tasked a senior executive, Claire Díaz-Ortiz, with reaching out to major religious leaders, including the pope. —T.K.


From www.worldmag.com