Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, has seen the largest growth in the number of followers on Twitter since declaring interest in the race, compared to his rivals.
According to data from StatiSense, Obi’s followers on the microblogging platform grew by 291 percent from March 2022, when he declared to run for Presidency under the platform of the Labour Party. He added 2.23 million new followers to beat Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party who garnered 868,000 new followers within the same period.
Obi’s total followership tally (2,996,548), however, still falls behind that of Atiku, who has 4,818,736 followers and leads the entire presidential candidates in the number of followers. Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress is third on the list with 1,679,097 followers, followed by Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party.
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Apart from acquiring the largest number of new followers on Twitter, Obi owes most of his popularity to his supporters’ dominance on social media which have ensured the candidate continues to be the major trending topic on the internet.
In July 2022, Google Nigeria said the top three trending people in Nigeria in the first half of the year were Obi, Vladimir Putin, and Bianca Ojukwu.
In September, another Google trends review of the frequency of searches for Obi, Tinubu, Atiku, Kwankwaso, and Omoyele Sowore, the candidate of the African Action Congress, showed that Obi had been the most searched candidate for Nigerians.
Google later confirmed in December that Obi was in the top 10 most searched topics in 2022.
Most of the polls released so far have tipped the former governor of Anambra State to win the election. He was predicted as the winner in all the three polls commissioned by the ANAP Foundation and conducted by NOI Polls Limited.
