By Julian Dierkes
A recent post about the Twitter accounts of foreign embassies in Ulaanbaatar proved to be more popular than I had anticipated, so I’ll turn that into a blog post below.
As far as I can tell, nine embassies to Mongolia currently maintain Twitter accounts ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????https://t.co/cypVwqeEu1
Mongolian missions maintain 31 Twitter accounts abroad (some ????)https://t.co/8VpI7MGx8n #DigitalDiplomacy #MGLfp pic.twitter.com/Wj8CzCe9jq— Julian Dierkes (@jdierkes) December 20, 2018
Tweeting Embassies in Mongolia
Having checked in with John Langtry (outgoing Australian ambassador), I have also added his account to this listing as representing the embassy of Australia.
In the initial listing, I had missed the Kazakh embassy in Ulaanbaatar.
With that, there are currently (early Jan 2019) 11 embassies in Ulaanbaatar who maintain active Twitter accounts:
- Australia
- Canada
- Cuba
- European Union
- France
- Kazakhstan
- India
- Russia
- Turkey
- United Kingdom
- United States
There are a number of ambassadors who maintain a personal presence as well (Jiri Brodsky, Czech ambassador may currently be the most active, the UK’s Philip Malone, Italy’s Andrea de Felip and the EU’s Traian Hristea are also represented), but these are more difficult to track. Of course, there have been some stand-out communicators in the past, most notable perhaps the UK’s Catherine Arnold who set the standard for engaged and engaging ambassadors from 2015-18 and recently received an O.B.E. for her diplomatic contributions.
What are they Tweeting?
For the most part, these accounts are fairly staid in their social media use. Most of them look very corporate, i.e. they follow design prescriptions from their ministries with the possible exceptions of the Russian embassy which uses a hard-to-see photograph of their not-so-striking-but-very-large embassy building and the Australian embassy which features a photo of the ambassador.
The Australian ambassador is also the only of these accounts that gets a bit more personal at times and also more active, while all the other accounts typically send out a fairly standard press-release-like diet of photos of ambassadors shaking hands (but not telling us what they might have spoken about with various Mongolian interlocutors) or promotion of activities of their embassy.
Embassies on Facebook
A number of these and other embassies also maintain a presence (often more active) on Facebook:
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