Figure 3 – EU tweets as a percentage of EU leaders’ total tweets

Figure 3 shows that the EU leaders most active on Twitter do not necessarily tweet proportionately on EU issues, but rather the contrary. However, a positive finding is that EU issues correspond on average to 18.5 % of EU leaders’ tweets collected during this study, showing that Europe does play a significant part in the Twitter communication of most EU Heads of State or Government. More than 20 % of the total Twitter activity of 16 EU Heads of State or Government covered EU issues. EU issues were the subject of around 30 % of five of these leaders’ tweets, and Peter Pellegrini and Klaus Iohannis (Romania held the rotating Council presidency during the period) even used around 40 % of their tweets to communicate on EU issues. However, neither use Twitter very often as a communication tool in general, maybe because at national level they prefer to use ‘traditional’ communication methods