Pope – 6 million Twitter followers

On April 29, at about midday, Pope Francis surpassed six million followers on social network Twitter.

Benedict XVI launched the account @Pontifex on December 12, 2012. During his remaining three months as Pope, he gained more than three million followers.

On March 13, Pope Francis took over the papal account, and since then, the number of followers swelled to over six million.

The Pope has in all nine accounts, in various languages. The largest is the English-language account with 2,437,262 followers, followed by Spanish, which has seen the largest increase since Pope Francis’ election, and could even surpass English. As of Monday afternoon, it had 2,155,737 followers.

The third largest account in in Italian, with 676,057 followers. It is followed by Portuguese with 278,780; French with 128,872; German with 99,718; Latin with 87,452; Polish with 80,812; and Arab with 55,437 followers.

Each week, since his election, Pope Francis has added on average about 60,000 followers. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the acceptance of the Latin account, which has been active since January 20 and has already surpassed two other widely used languages.