Australia loses top 10 position for national leader tweeters

At least 33 national leaders around the world are now tweeting through official accounts - that's 20% of the world community.

Under former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd Australia was fourth on a list of the top ten tweeting world leaders, however with the transition to Prime Minister Julia Gillard our position dropped to 14th.

A report from Digital Daya, World Leaders on Twitter: Updated Ranking Report - October 2010 (PDF 698kb), maps out the tweeting behaviour of 33 world leaders. It also makes it clear that tweeting is not only for English speaking democracies - a variety of nation states are represented including Turkey, Chile, Russia, the Philippines, Rwanda and France.

It's an interesting glimpse at how world leaders are bypass traditional media channels, using a direct way of speaking to their people to engage without message distortion.