The Republic of the Philippines’ official YouTube account, RTVMalacanang, is the second most active amongst world leaders according to a recent study conducted by a global public relations and communications firm.
Based on its research, Burson-Marsteller stated that the Philippines’ Presidential Broadcast Staff channel has the second highest number of videos uploaded on YouTube with over 8,000 clips under its belt. It is bested only by the Presidency of Colombia (/SigColombia) which has 8,696 videos during the time of the study.
But despite of its diligence in uploading contents on its YouTube channel, the RTVMalacanang still lags behind other world leaders in terms of engagements which include likes/dislikes, share, and comments. In our opinion, this might be due to the current situation of internet access in the country, the lack of knowledge of its citizen about the channel’s existence, or users just don’t find the contents on the channel that interesting or relevant.
Our latter theory seems to go in line with the Burson-Marsteller’s findings which claim that the most-viewed clips on YouTube from world leaders are those that “provide more entertainment than information value”, citing examples such as Queen Rania of Jordan’s Top 10 list of reasons why she decided to create a YouTube account, and the video that President Obama uploaded in 2008 where he and DeGeneres were dancing to one of Queen Bey’s hits.
Not surprisingly, the aformentioned entertaining contents resulted to more engagements on the video sharing website. On its recent study, The White House and President Barack Obama’s YouTube channels tops the YouTube rankings based on number of views, subscribers, and interactions.
More than just stats
While the stats that Burson-Marsteller has recently provided might pique the interest of some people, the most important information that the public relation firm has uncovered on its research is the fact that world leaders are ready to leverage whatever platform that’s available in order to communicate with its constituents.
Jeremy Galbraith, Burson-Marsteller’s Global Chief Strategy Officer, said that the “study illustrates that governments are ready to communicate across all the key social media platforms.” Donald Baer, the PR firm’s Worldwide Chair and CEO also shares the same sentiments, saying that “the extensive use of YouTube by world leaders emphasizes the growing power video content is playing in the communications field and the increasing shift in efforts to get messages across to audiences around the world. Video is now a central component of any successful communications campaign.”
The research was conducted on March of this year and is part of Burson-Marsteller’s annual Twiplomacy. If you want to find out more details about how global leaders leverage YouTube, head over to the source link below or checkout the Twiplomacy 2016 on this link.
