December 13, 2012. (Romereports.com) Exactly 24 hours after Benedict XVI sent out his first tweet in several languages, the number of Twitter followers to his eight accounts ballooned in size.

His English-language account, @pontifex, saw the largest surge in popularity. Before sending out his first tweet, he had 672,590 followers. But a full 24 hours since, the number swelled to 1,038,570 followers.


But the other foreign language accounts also saw noticeable gains:

His account in Spanish is the second largest with 376,290 followers. That number is up by a whopping 205,880, nearly tripled in size.

In third place, Italian-language followers numbered 153,620, an increase of 58,508 users.

The Portuguese account is fourth in size with 41,796, closely followed by French with 37,038.

Rounding out the remaining accounts is German, the Pope's native tongue, which saw a 12,330 increase to reach 31,664 followers. His Polish account reached 16,032 subscribers, while Arabic, his least followed account, doubled in size to 12,105.

In total, there were 1,705,115 Twitter users following Benedict XVI exactly 24 hours after his first tweet, an increase of 688,588 followers. But those numbers will likely continue to rise as the Pope ushers in a new digital era.


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