Pope Francis will make his Instagram debut on Saturday, joining the list of other celebrities on the image-sharing forum under the handle Franciscus, the Vatican confirmed Wednesday.
The date for the
pontiff’s debut on the celebrity-dominated social medium was chosen by the
79-year-old himself as it marks the third anniversary of his inauguration as
the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
The move represents the
latest plank of a Vatican social media strategy designed to ensure Francis’s
message reaches a maximum number of believers and non-believers across the
world with particular focus on the younger generation.
Francis is already a
major player on Twitter. Under the @Pontifex handle he tweets in nine
languages, including Latin, with the English account followed by nearly nine
million people and the Spanish one by more than 11 million.
The move to join
Instagram has been anticipated for some time as it is now bigger and
faster-growing than Twitter with some 400 million users worldwide.
Kevin Systrom,
Instagram’s CEO and co-founder, met the pontiff at the Vatican last month,
later revealing they had discussed “the power of images to unite people across
different cultures and languages.”
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