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  • President Donald Trump's use of Twitter is unprecedented for a world leader.

  • Consider his audience, the president's personal account @realdonaldtrump has roughly 24 million followers.

  • Compared that to his neighbouring leaders,

  • Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has 6 million,

  • and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with less than 3 million.

  • Barack Obama's personal account has 4 times as many followers as Trump,

  • but half as many actual tweets.

  • Trump built his campaign around the idea of speaking frankly and directly to people,

  • and Twitter provides the ideal platform for this.

  • He tweeted more than 240 times since the auguration day,

  • often directing that day's news flow in 140 characters or less.

  • Sometimes is to share his schedule,

  • sometimes to discuss foreign affairs,

  • and sometimes none of the above.

  • But with all of the added attention that the president has brought to Twitter over the past few months,

  • is the company attracting new users?

  • Not according to ComScore.

  • ComScore reported that Twitter's mobile app users actually fell more than 6 percent in November from the year before,

  • and 5 percent again in December to 45 million unit users.

  • For contacts, Snapchat has 82 million in the same month.

  • Facebook? Twice that.

  • Trump's spotlight on Twitter hasn't helped invested sentiments much either.

  • Shares are flat since election day.

  • And on the days that Trump tweets something particularly engaging to users, Twitter is not usually rewarded with the bump in the stock price.

  • For example, his most popular tweet by likes and retweets last month was this one, from Sunday January 2nd.

  • Liked by nearly 400,000 users and retweeted over 83,000 times,

  • but when trading resumed the next day, shares closed nearly flat.

  • UBS and pivotal research both downgraded Twitter from buy to hold last month,

  • citing among other things, muted growth among monthly average users.

  • So if Twitter the company is not benefiting from superuser President Trump, who is?

  • Perhaps democracy?

  • Twitter analyst James Cakmak from Monness Crespi Hardt wrote in December,

  • "Twitter is the lone platform where people worldwide can have a voice to serve as checks and balances on the media...

  • So Twitter still has a good chance to move onward and upward,

  • but we may not see it in revenue just yet."

President Donald Trump's use of Twitter is unprecedented for a world leader.

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