The recent visit of “rockstar” Pope Francis in the Philippines broke records not just in terms of the crowds it drew, but also tweets.
The pontiff, considered one of the world’s most tech-savvy leaders, ignited a social media frenzy in the Philippines even ahead of his visit.
Philippine mobile operator Smart Communications, sharing official data from San Francisco-based Twitter, reveals there were over 3.3 million tweets related to the papal visit from January 13 to 20. The tweets reached their peak at 6:30 pm on January 15, when the Pope arrived in Manila, with 3,664 tweets recorded per second. Smart says the figures “broke Twitter records in the Philippines.”
Smart says a tweet by the Pope through his @Pontifex account on January 16 also became the Philippines’ most retweeted tweet of all time, as well as the most retweeted from the Pope’s account.
The tweet – delivered in the vernacular: “Ang Pilipinas ay patunay ng kabataan at kasiglahan ng Simbahan” (The Philippines is witness to the youth and vitality of the Church) – had nearly 76,000 retweets and almost 90,000 favorites.
Pope Francis has recognized the big role of social media in spreading the teachings of the Catholic Church. He is now the second most followed world leader on Twitter, with his messages on Catechism and the Church’s position on moral and social issues being consistently shared thousands of times.
Prior to his visit to the Philippines, Pope Francis had over 17 million followers across his accounts in nine different languages. During his visit, his @Pontifex account added over 365,000 followers.
Twitter and Smart teamed up to provide free mobile internet access so that users without a data plan could access the popular social networking app for the duration of the papal visit. This allowed more Filipino netizens to follow the Pope’s account, get real-time news and updates, send wishes using the #DearPopeFrancis hashtag, and participate in the social media conversation.
Many mobile internet users in the Philippines registered and availed of the free service, according to Smart.
Twitter has over 284 million monthly active users around the world – 80 percent of whom are on mobile.
See: 5 ways that social media rocked the Philippines in 2013
Editing by J.T. Quigley and Steven Millward, Image by Flickr
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