President Humala, most influential person in Peruvian cyberspace. Politicians not seizing opportunities in the arena.

President Ollanta Humala is the most influential person in Peruvian cyberspace. Yet, other politicians seem not to seize the opportunities and don't seem interested on social media.

For the second consecutive year, a study conducted by the firm Llorente & Cuenca identified President Humala as the most influential person in social media in Peru. This study, conducted last August, presented the list of the most influential people online, including politicians, journalists, celebrities, sportsman and women, CEOs, leaders of opinion, among others.

The lists’ “top ten” lead by President Humala, also includes six journalists –five of them hosting news TV shows, one of them mainly a blogger- two TV celebrities, and a Latin-Grammy award winner.

Interesting enough, besides President Humala, only three politicians appear on the lists’ “top 50”: Peruvian First Lady Nadine Heredia (#18 on the list), a very active and one of the most controversial politicians of the moment, and Susana Villarán (#41), the Mayor of Lima, Peru’s capital city.

This study considers Twitter as the most influential social media tool in Peruvian cybersphere and that takes into account the number of followers on Twitter, the number of retweets, number of mentions, and influence measure based on automated tools.

They say comparisons are odious –especially if we have to consider major barriers such as population, infrastructure gaps and connectivity rates - but they can be helpful to analyze how Peruvian politicians are underperforming online.

President Barack Obama has more than 37 million followers on Twitter, but here we are talking of a totally different scale. Nevertheless, comparing President Humala’s presence on Twitter (just taking into consideration number of followers) with his pairs in South America leads us to believe that social media has not become very popular among Peruvian politicians.

• President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (Argentina): more than 2.3 million followers.
• President Juan Manuel Santos (Colombia): more than 2.1 million followers.
• President Dilma Rousseff (Brasil): more than 1.9 million followers, but not active since 2010.
• President Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela): more than 1.3 million followers. Former President Hugo Chavez, had more than 4.1 followers.
• President Rafael Correa (Ecuador): more than 1.2 million followers.
• President Sebastian Piñera (Chile): more than 1.1 million followers.
• President Ollanta Humala (Peru): 667,568 followers.
• President Horacio Cartes (Paraguay): more than 96,000 followers.
• President José Mujica (Uruguay) and Evo Morales (Bolivia) have no official twitter account.