Pope Francis dominates Twitter

VATICAN CITY, June 25 (UPI) -- Pope Francis may not have more Twitter followers than Barack Obama, but according to a new study, he's the most influential person on the Twittersphere.

There nine different versions of the Pope's handle @Pontifex, each one for a different language. All totaled, he has 14 million followers. That's just a third of the following President Obama has. Still, when it comes to clout, no one tops Pope Francis.

"It's not the number of followers which is really important, but the reach, the engagement," explained Matthias Lüfkens, who conducts the annual Twiplomacy survey.

While Obama's tweets are retweeted an average of 1,442 times, Pope Francis gets 10,000 retweets for every Spanish tweet and 6,462 retweets on his English account.

The recent survey reveals all sorts of metrics on the world leaders who are most attuned to one of the 21st century's most popular social mediums. One of the surprise influencers is newly elected Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. Since he was elected in late May, @NarendraModi has skyrocketed into fourth place on the list of most-followed leaders with nearly five million.

But who is the most engaging?

The superlative belongs to Ugandan Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi (@AmamaMbabazi) who routinely responds to his followers and others who tweet at him. Some 95 percent of his tweets are replies.