South Korean president Park Geun-hye has issued a press release to announce that her Klout score went up. Seriously.
Klout, a startup that measures influence on social media, is one of those tools that people mock in public while privately checking to see where they stand. Park, who won election by a tight margin, is obviously less bashful about it.
Park’s Klout score is 82. That’s up from 65 in February, when she took office, according to a report from South Korea’s state-run Yonhap News Agency, which wrote up the press release. US president Barack “Obama’s score is 99, and pop singer Justin Bieber’s score is 92,” Yonhap noted for context.
Park’s social media ascendancy, such as it is, might have something to do with her tendency to post cute images on Twitter. These include photos of adorable children’s plush toys and dogs playing in a garden, which her followers have retweeted in the hundreds. Pro tip for Park: Your Klout score might be even higher if you connected your Facebook profile, too.
In reality, it’s not at all surprising that Park’s stature on social media has risen since she became the most powerful person in South Korea. And not to brag or anything, but Quartz’s Klout score is 81, just a point shy of Park.
Park, a conservative, is South Korea’s first female president. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, who led the country under a dictatorship from 1961 until he was assassinated in 1979. That legacy has made Park a contentious figure in South Korean politics, and her office may be overeager to prove she is liked—on Facebook or otherwise.
When Park visited China in June, she was briefly a trending topic on China’s microblogging service Sina Weibo.