The days when you had to write hundreds of letters to get a direct line to a person with international standing are long past.
Social media has changed all that and world leaders and international organisations use social networks to raise their profiles and get their messages out. But which of the major NGOs have the most effective policies, and why?
A new piece of research by Twiplomacy shows the extent to which international NGOs use Twitter to communicate with the public.
But don’t take my word for it – here are some handy infographics to show the NGOs with the most Twitter clout.
Here we can see the average number of retweets per tweet that these organisations get. The figures may however be slightly skewed by, say, the discovery of a God particle that gives mass to all matter.
Of course, we also need to know how many followers these organisations have before we jump to any wild conclusions. So here is a graph.
And here is another, showing how many thousands of followers each account needs to get one retweet.
As we can see here, CERN, as well as having the most retweets per tweet, also has the fewest followers. A wild extrapolation would be that the Twitterati are more concerned with accelerating electrons than humanitarian and environmental causes.
So congratulations to the nerds at CERN! You’re only 51,387 retweets short of a 19 year old pop star.
This is what it is all about. Family. #happybirthdayJaxon and yeah he did it to me too. Lol https://t.co/rRxuRLXmND
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) November 21, 2013