Barack Obama has joined Twitter and broken a Guinness World Record.
[Related: A Look Inside the Obama’s Finances]
Some of you are probably thinking, “Just joined Twitter? He’s been on the social media site for years—it maybe even helped him win an election.” And you’d be correct—the President’s checkmarked profile, currently with 59.4 million followers, has been active since 2007.
But on Monday, the handle @POTUS (President of the United States) debuted, featuring tweets exclusively from the president. According to Forbes, it was amassing about 3,314 followers per minute in the time between his first tweet around noon and racking up his millionth follower around 4:15 p.m.
So, in just a little more than four hours, the Leader of the Free World got more followers on the microblogging site than many of us will ever see in our social media lifetime.
Within his first 24 hours, Obama was averaging 1,213 followers per minute. As of this writing, he had 2.17 million followers.
He’s still behind Twitter buddy and former President Bill Clinton, who has 3.52 million followers, and former rival Hillary Clinton, who has 3.54 million.
But back to the world record. According to the Huffington Post, Obama logged the “fastest time to reach 1 million followers on Twitter.” That honor had previously been held by Avengers actor Robert Downey Jr., who reached the milestone in about 24 hours upon joining Twitter in April 2014.
His new account is not in the top-tier of users with the most followers—at least not yet. The honor for the most followers belongs to singer Katy Perry, who has 69.9 million followers, and Justin Bieber, who comes in second with 64 million. Obama’s first Twitter account, run by the group Organizing for Action, is at No. 59.4 million followers.
