Prime Minister Narendra Modi has no plans to step down from the podium of the most followed Indian on Twitter. Modi continued to top Twitter's most followed Indians list with 37.5 million followers. He is followed by actors Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan with 31.6 million and 31 million followers, respectively.
Modi also emerged as the "most tweeted about world leader" after US President Donald Trump in 2017, according to a trends report from the microblogging site for the year 2017.
Unsurprisingly, S.S. Rajamouli's magnum opus Baahubali II, released in April this year, was the most talked about and trending entertainment topic on Twitter in India. Entertainment hashtags saw the domination of South Indian cinemas with #baahubali2 and #Mersal among the most popular topics of discussion. Vijay-starrer Tamil movie Mersal had raked up controversy over its anti-GST dialogue.
India's unified tax regime the Goods and Services Tax also emerged as one among the most popular topics of discussion. #gst is the second most popular hashtag under News and Politics, followed by Modi's talk show Mann Ki Baat.
Under sports, Champions Trophy 2017, India vs Pakistan match, IPL and Women's World Cup were the most discussed Indian events, with #ct17, #indvpak, #IPL and #wwc17, trending, respectively.
However, Twitter's most popular post of 2017 was from Barack Obama. Three tweets by the former US leader made it into Twitter's Top 10 list of retweeted messages for this year. Interestingly, none from Trump featured in this list despite his prolific use of the platform.
Globally, though Trump was the elected leader most tweeted about, his predecessor Barack Obama's was the most popular post of 2017. Three tweets by the former US leader made it onto Twitter's Top 10 list of retweeted messages for this year but there were none from Trump despite his prolific use of the platform.
A tweet racking up the most "likes," about 4.6 million as of Tuesday, came from Obama's personal Twitter account on the day of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The tweet showed a photo of a racially diverse group of children looking out a window at Obama as he smiled back, and bore a quote from Nelson Mandela.
The same Twitter post was the second most re-tweeted of the year, behind a tweet from a teenager trying to win a year's supply of chicken nuggets from fast food chain Wendy's.
No president could compete with free nuggets, however. A 16-year-old named Carter Wilkerson, @carterjwm, garnered 3.6 million retweets in his campaign for a year’s supply of nuggets from Wendy‘s.
He came up short of Wendy’s target of 18 million retweets, but Wendy’s still gave him the nuggets and a $100,000 donation in his name to the Wendy‘s-linked Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption.
(With inputs from agencies)
