More than 1.1 billion social media users closely followed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual news conference, which was held on December 20, the Medialogiya monitoring company said in a report, Trend reports referring to TASS.
Social media users left a total of 584,000 messages from December 20 to 22 concerning the president’s news conference. "The total coverage was more than 1.1 billion users. These figures considerably exceeded those of 2017, which in general corresponds to the overall increase in user activity along social media," the company noted.
Most social media users were interested in Putin’s answer about his marriage prospects (38% of the total audience), his statement about pension changes (29%) and the president’s interview with 17-year-old Regina Parpiyeva, who is suffering from a rare disease (7.5%). Putin’s remarks that the Russian government would not allow any oil price hikes in 2019 (3.2%) and which present he would like to receive for New Year (2.3%) were also popular on social media.
Medialogiya studied comments on Twitter, Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Telegram, as well as on blogs and forums. The survey was carried out on December 20-22, 2018.
Vladimir Putin’s annual news conference was held on December 20. The head of state talked to reporters for the 14th time in this format. During the year-end Q&A marathon, 53 media representatives asked the Russian leader questions for three hours and 43 minutes. According to the research company Mediascope, the annual news conference, which was broadcast on Channel One, Rossiya-1, Rossiya-24 and NTV, drew a 6.7-million audience aged over 18.