Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to be bringing his trademark Twitter diplomacy to India too. On March 24, the Prime Minister followed 141 new handles, mostly Indian political leaders across the spectrum. He now follows 1371 handles while he has 18,820,151 followers. On March 24, as most of India celebrated Holi, @narendramodi started following political leaders like Arvind Kejriwal, Capt Amarinder Singh and Sharad Yadav. He also followed the Office of Rahul Gandhi as well as a bunch of young Congress leaders like Milind Deora, Deepender Hooda and Jyotiraditya Scindia. He also followed Sitaram Yechury and Jagan Mohan Reddy as well as Shashi Tharoor and Omar Abdullah, who are Twitter stars in their own right. Both Kejriwal and Tharoo reacted to the same: .@narendramodi Sir, thank u for following me. Happy Holi. आज गिले शिकवे भूलने का दिन है। Hope better Centre-Delhi cooperation in future — Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) March 24, 2016 Fascinating. I was gratified by @PMOIndia & @narendramodi following me (as I follow them on @twitter), until this! — Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) March 24, 2016 From the states, he added Naveen Patnaik, Lalu Prasad and his son Tejashvi Yadav as well as Mamata Banerjee. In fact, the PM seems to have been paying some special attention to states that are going to the elections in the coming weeks and followed handles like @bjpassampradesh, BJP Assam convener @himantabiswa and Dr.Mahendra Singh who is in charge of the party affairs in Assam. He also followed Kummanam Rajashekhran, state president of the BJP in Kerala. Among BJP leaders, he followed ministers like Mahesh Sharma, Vijender Gupta and Shanta Kumar. Beyond the realm of politics, he followed Chess legend Vishvanathan Anand and Snooker champion Pankaj Advani. He also followed poet Prasoon Joshi and journalist Sudhir Chaudhary of Zee TV. According to Twitter Counter, Modi is number 59 among all Twitter accounts in terms of popularity. Twitonomy says he has mentioned @UN the most, followed by @AbeShinzo, @makeinIndia and @David_Cameron. On an average he tweets about 9.45 times a day, which is quite high. He tweets more on Sundays and around 9 pm in the evening. Most of his tweets are posted using the web client, while he seems to use the BlackBerry and iPhone clients too, as per data on Twitonomy.
