Latin American Presidents on Twitter

I wrote about Latin American presidents on Twitter a bit in May. As of today, here is a more detailed look at what presidents are doing.

Country	President	Status	#Followers	#Following	Type	Retweets
ARG	Kirchner	Active	2.1 million	54	All	None
BOL	Morales	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
BRAZIL	Rousseff	Inactive	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
CHILE	Piñera	Active	1 million	22,266	Policy	Common
COL	Santos	Active	1.9 million	5,856	Policy	Rare
CR	Chinchilla	Active	200,000	575	Policy	Common
CUBA	Castro	Active	92,000	36	Speeches	None
DR	Medina	Active	199,000	7,979	Policy	None
ECUA	Correa	Active	1 million	5	All	None
EL SAL	Funes	Inactive	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
GUATE	Pérez M	Active	87,000	52	Policy	Common
HOND	Lobo	Active	22,000	19	Policy	Rare
MEX	Peña	Active	1.9 million	159	Policy	Rare
NICA	Ortega	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
PAN	Martinelli	Active	346,000	752	All	Common
PARA	Franco	Active	66,000	198	Policy	None
PERU	Humala	Sporadic	626,000	60	Policy	None
URU	Mujica	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
VEN	Maduro	Active	1.2 million	34	All	Common

Neither deductive nor inductive reasoning help us a lot here, unless there are patterns I am missing. Some initial thoughts:

• A majority (about 3/4) of presidents are on Twitter, suggesting they see intrinsic value in it.
• Ideology doesn't matter much. On the left Cristina Kirchner and Nicolás Maduro are very active, but all the presidents with no account or an inactive one are left or center-left. Nicolás Maduro attacks the opposition on Twitter, but so does Ricardo Martinelli.
• At the same time, 3 out of the 4 presidents who tweet on all different types of topics rather than just summary of specific policies/events are left of center. Almost by definition, they have the most interesting tweets.
• Presidents with a lot of followers tend to be in larger, wealthier countries (Rafael Correa is an exception).
• Presidents who follow a lot of other people tend to have dull and dry tweets.
• Ricardo Martinelli is entertaining and should have more followers. E.g. from June 27: Hoy un periodico mencionò que hoy hacia mi viaje 82.Viendo mi pasaporte veo 57 sellos de salida. hay que contar mejor.

Further, this tells us nothing about effectiveness. Presidents want to reach people and thereby gain support, but as yet I've not seen any evidence--perhaps with polling?--about whether it benefits them politically. An aide to Dilma Rousseff said that she thought Twitter is a "total waste of time." Clearly others disagree, but we don't have a good grip on how to evaluate that.