Can Pope Benedict XVI ‘overtake’ Lady Gaga on Twitter?

London: Pope Benedict XVI will be lucky to break into the list of top 20 most followed people on Twitter, social media experts have said.

Nearly 32 million people follow Lady Gaga on Twitter; just behind her is fellow popstar Justin Bieber. Of the top 10 users, eight are celebrities, from Kim Kardshian to Taylor Swift and Rihanna, the Telegraph reports. According to an earlier media report, the Pope already has over 30,000 followers on the micro blogging site. His closest religious rival on Twitter is the Dalai Lama, the paper said. The paper said that if we assume that the distribution of Buddhist access to technology is, on average, similar to that of Catholics’, then at the very most one in a hundred followers have chosen to follow the Dalai Lama. If we assume that the same proportion of the 1.25bn Catholics follow the Pope, he’ll come in at number 22 with 12.5m. Just behind Eminem, the report said. Of course, mapping number of Catholics directly to number of followers is totally inexact, but it produces a far more optimistic estimate than bookmakers Ladbroke``s suggestions that they’ll offer odds on the Pope getting over a million Twitter faithful by the end of the year, the paper added. According to the report, given that he already has over 360,000 followers, it might be worth placing a bet today. ANI