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@pmharperHad breakfast with Stanley http://ow.ly/hbMsE #dayinthelife

A new ranking of world leaders' Twitter use ranks Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 38th place.

It says Mr. Harper has more than 357,000 followers, well behind the 33.5 million of Barack Obama and Pope Francis, at 7.2 million.

The so-called Twiplomacy study was conducted by the New York-based firm Burson-Marsteller, which bills itself as an "evidence-based" communications firm.

"Prime Minister Harper was the fourth world leader to sign up to Twitter in July 2007 in the footsteps of (at)BarackObama, however he only started to tweet in September 2008 asking his followers to 'check out the new Conservative Party website'," the report says.

"Although the tweets are written in first person he rarely writes the tweets himself."

It also says Mr. Harper doesn't engage frequently with others on Twitter. That would appear to include most other world leaders, including the U.S. president. Mr. Harper doesn't follow Mr. Obama's feed.

"Prime Minister Harper is not very conversational, only 2% of his tweets are (at)replies and 6% retweets," the survey said.

"Surprisingly (at)PMHarper only follows Russian Prime Minister (at)MedvedevRussia and Uganda's PM (at)AmamaMbabazi but does not follow his peer at the White House."

The survey says Mr. Harper tweets his "vision" of Canada in an "informal way" and sometimes lets followers "enter his personal life."

That latter observation appears to reference the January day when Mr. Harper used his account to chronicle "a day in the life" as prime minister.

Most recently, Mr. Harper's office used the 140-character social media tool to announce the new portfolios in last week's cabinet shuffle.

An hour before he unveiled his new cabinet, Mr. Harper's account began tweeting individual new portfolios in what was viewed by some pundits as a social media striptease.

Mr. Harper's office has not been willing to indicate who actually does his tweeting, saying the prime minister only "occasionally" posts himself.

"His Twitter account is also empathetic when needed, e.g. on the occurrence of natural disasters," said the Twiplomacy study.

"During the election campaign in 2011 he traded 140-character blows in a Twitter exchange with his opponent, Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff ((at)M—Ignatieff) who had challenged him to a one-on-one debate."

The study ranked the Obama administration's institutional (at)whitehouse account in third place with more than four million followers.

Curiously, the top five was rounded out by two politicians from Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul with 3.7 million and 3.4 million followers respectively.

The study also examined the use of Twitter by diplomats.

It said Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird was "a firm believer in the benefits of digital diplomacy."

Mr. Baird "personally tweets from his iPhone" in both official languages both "on key foreign politics issues, with Syria crisis playing a major role in his updates, and his institutional agenda, speeches and meetings but without leaving out his passion for the Ottawa Senators hockey team."

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