Social networking in Latin America: Follow the leader

LATIN AMERICANS, it seems, have swiftly become addicted to social networking, with users spending ten hours a month (twice as much as the average in the rest of the world) on services such as Facebook, LinkedIn and, especially, Twitter, according to a study by ComScore, a consultancy, published in May. It found that five countries in the region rank in the global top ten for “engagement” (ie, hours spent per month) with social networks.So it is not surprising that Latin American presidents have taken to tweeting with gusto. Seven of the 25 most-followed world leaders hail from the region, according to Twiplomacy, a website. Among the most active is Argentina’s Cristina Fernández. She seems to view Twitter’s 140-character limit as rather like the other checks on her power: an annoyance to be sidestepped rather than a hard rule. She frequently tweets out verbose diatribes split across dozens of messages; she once tweeted 34 times in 32 minutes. Although she has over 2m followers, she herself follows only 54, with not a single non-Latin American leader among them.The most “conversational” Latin American leader is Ecuador’s Rafael Correa: 83% of his tweets are replies to other users. But then Mr Correa is a man whose sensitivity to criticism led him to take a criminal libel case against a newspaper and to place legislative curbs on the media. Mr Correa is popular: he has over...



via The Economist: The Americas http://www.economist.com