20 Most Powerful People on Twitter in Lebanon Vote Now!

World Twitter Ranking: 16,500 – UP 500
Follow @HaifaWehbe

[answername 26] has got [answercount 26] votes, which is [answerpercent 26]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Increasing her follower base by 50,000 in just a few weeks, superstar Haifa Wehbe, aka 2Famous Diva, now has 226 000 active followers, and is still the unchallenged Queen of the Lebanese Tweeter-sphere. Of course, being an international superstar gives her the advantage of having fans and followers from countries with real internet (sorry Lebanon, you all know what we mean…) Even knowing that her local fans have a hard time loading Twitter she takes them seriously, and is famous for interacting with her patient followers.

And they do appreciate it. In web forums and blogs all over the world she is being praised for her tweets and her presence among her fans. She even thanked 2famous.TV when we released the Twitter list a month ago!

When @MrMatias from 2Famous.TV lost his phone he tweeted Haifa to ask her what phone she was using and then asked for a spare one. Longshot, but, nevertheless, she replied:

Then the power cut and the connection got lost, so Matias never got Haifa’s phone. That’s a bit how Twitter works; You need to react quickly to be able to interact because a Tweet becomes history as soon as it has been sent, like a feather falling from the sky, looking to be picked up by the wind and travel into the unknown horizon… Well, ehm, new phone or not, three mentions from Haifa made Matias’ twitter account skyrocket by 100.000 places on the world twitter rank system. Haifa manages to be a superstar and still manages to give a lot of herself in her tweets.

Any superstar or superstar wannabes have something to learn from Haifa when it comes to Twitter, because she really “gets” it. And now her picture is all over town on some rather nice looking billboards #superstar

(We still don’t have phones we can tweet from, so if HTC, Apple or Nokia reads this, well, then we would like to get a free phone from you. We’re sure we could work something out to make it worth it for you too;)

Here are her latest Tweets:

[answername 27] has got [answercount 27] votes, which is [answerpercent 27]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

As a foreigner in Lebanon it’s hard to keep track of the politics that happens in this country. But through Twitter we can at least we get a general idea. Saad Hariri is still present on Twitter and has a rock solid position as the second most influential person on Twitter in Lebanon.

We had the pleasure of talking about our Walk of Causes project, where we walked across Lebanon, at the Rafiq Hariri University on Earth Day. His dad has a university named after him! How cool is that? Unfortunately Hariri was not attending our talk, but the enthusiastic students (who’s all on twitter, obviously) made us forget that he wasn’t there, and showed us some good time at the campus!

When it comes to his tweeting it is pretty obvious that he is a politician, and he tweets about issues that he finds important. And if he is anything like the students we met he is probably really cool.

He has 130000 followers but we suspect he could have had a lot more if his fans had real internet.

Here is an article that New York Times wrote about his Tweeting.

Here are his latest Tweets:

[answername 28] has got [answercount 28] votes, which is [answerpercent 28]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Thanks for taking us to dinner Zaven! After we launched the previous list Zaven got interested in our work and wanted to meet us. Not knowing too much about him, except for a quick google around, we had a really good time getting to know him and his friends!

Later he had his team to interview us and made a show about Twitter in Lebanon. Zaven might be third on this list, but he was the first to do a “Home at Matias and Jørgen’s place” for a TV show! That proves he’s a good journalist, and that has a great eye to spot talent! Our vote totally goes to him. He is very active on Twitter and does some cool contest every ones in a while. Like this one:

That’s the way we like to see people use Twitter!

Here are his latest Tweets:

[answername 29] has got [answercount 29] votes, which is [answerpercent 29]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

With her 240.000 followers on Twitter Elissa is undoubtedly one of the biggest superstars in Lebanon. The fact that she is ranked under people with lower scores might be explained by the fact that she is too 2famous which makes people feel intimidated by her and think that she is unreachable, so they don’t interact as much as other fans? Anyways, she gets so many direct messages and hate males that she cant answer them all:

If our algorithm had taken pictures on Twitter into consideration, there is a chance Elissa would have ranked even higher. She tweets a lot of pictures. She is also known for her general inspirational tweet quotes, like:

Personally we like it better when she tweets with a personal twist, something we have noticed happening more of lately.

Sometimes she retweets interesting articles and she updates her fans on where she is going. But still, it is hard to get to know Elissa through her tweets, something that could play a factor to why she doesn’t earn the top score on the list. But if she really went for it, it wouldn’t take Elissa much effort to climb on the list. She just have to share more of herself.

Here are her latest Tweets:

[answername 30] has got [answercount 30] votes, which is [answerpercent 30]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Checking out Mr Mikatis’ Tweets makes us feel lucky that we’re not in politics. It’s very complicated stuff. Like some sort of science that has it’s own vocabulary. He often tweets his meeting agendas and it seems really hectic being the prime minister. Though, we have to admit, as outsiders that don’t understand much of the local politics, we don’t find his style so entertaining.

But with 42.000 people following him we are sure a lot of people are very interested in his tweets. He tweets both in Arabic and English and the tweets that he writes himself is signed with N.M. His team #hashtags the tweets they make and this seems to be a great way of creating clarity about who is tweeting what from the account. Because it is always a bummer when you suspect that someone else is tweeting from your heroes account, right?

He tweets about the meetings he is going to and who he is meeting. Once in a while it seems he spends some time tweeting, retweeting and answering his followers. We just follow him since he is the president and in case he one days tweets: “We will get real internet!” We would so totally retweet that tweet!

Here are his latest Tweets:

[answername 31] has got [answercount 31] votes, which is [answerpercent 31]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

We still haven’t learnt Arabic, but we notice that Sayyed has gone up 6000 places on the world Twitter rank. This could be an indication that more and more people in the Arab world are using Twitter to spread information in their own language. This is good news for Sayyed Ali El Amin who only tweets in Arabic. Sayyed has more than 30,000 likes on his FaceBook page, he has a webpage and, like 2Famous.TV, he has his own channel on YouTube. Because of the slow internet we couldn’t check out to much of his stuff, but he puts videos from interviews and TV-shows he attends. And his channel is probably a great way for his fans to stay updated – as long as they understand Arabic better than the 2famous.TV crew.

Here is one of his tweets translated from Arabic by one of our readers:

Here are his latest Tweets:

[answername 32] has got [answercount 32] votes, which is [answerpercent 32]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

If hotness was part of the algorithm for making this list, Mona Abou Hamze would have most definitely been right up there on the top. But even if being extremely gorgeous doesn’t help Mona much on this list, she still manages to claim an impressive 7th place! What does she do? We’re sure most Lebanese know this, but as two outsiders trying to figure out what the Lebanese fame scene is all about, it can be a bit hard to catch Mona. Or it might be that our research methods are not good enough to capture her essence – unless she simply is one of those famous housewives that are famous because they are housewives, something that a lot of people can identify with.

Whatever it is, she has a blog in Arabic, and she often tweets links to her latest blogposts.

And we are glad to see when stars use Twitter to interact with their followers, not only to inform them (as many politicians do). We can also reveal that she is, like the 2famous.TV crew, concerned about social issues that she think is important, though she seems to be a bit more mysterious about it:

And, did we mention that she is hot?

Here are her latest Tweets:

[answername 33] has got [answercount 33] votes, which is [answerpercent 33]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

We always enjoy following activists on Twitter as we know they have a huge potential influence when their agenda hits the international news stream. Activists often seem to be lurking around with the potential of booming when the time is right. Imad is still the highest ranked activist on the List at number 8.

He is also running a pretty popular blog, and is nominated for Nations United Blog Award in Toronto in June, which is pretty awesome!

His blog was featured on the 2famous.TV list of the 40 most visited blogs in Lebanon.

He tweets about his life as an activist and, to the pleasure of his followers, he manages to keep a personal touch while still tweeting interesting information. It seems like he answers and retweets quite a bit. He tweets mostly in English, and a bit in Arabic.

Imad Bazzi thinks blogging is the most efficient way of doing activism in Lebanon, and he uses his own blog to raise awareness about social issues in the Middle East.

Here is a tweet from his life as an activist doing a workshop in Tunisia.

Here are his latest Tweets:

[answername 35] has got [answercount 35] votes, which is [answerpercent 35]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

We were in doubt if we should allow this account on the list or not. On the one hand, we only accept personal Twitter accounts. And strictly speaking this is not a personal Twitter account. On the other hand we got quite impressed by @Lebshawnquotes that is run by two teenage boys. They didn’t get ranked in the previous list, but have now changed their location to “Lebanon” so that they can be ranked by 2famous.TV!

So, in order for the 2famous.TV crew not to split over a silly fight about the civil status of a Twitter account, we decided to let it pass. Because @Lebshawnquotes is one of the surprising newcomers that changes the look of the top Tweeps in Lebanon.

It’s somehow different to any of the other accounts on the list, as it’s run by two 14 year old girls. And if you are, like 2famous.TV, born before the 90s, you will soon understand that you are an internet retard in comparison to the new kids.

Because these girls decided that they wanted to spread some love and laughter to the lebanese people, and started a Twitter account together to tell jokes. So if you’re in for a laugh every once in a while, it’s totally worth following these two pioneers. They found a niche and went for it. Great job!

And as many young people on Twitter (and in life generally) they understand the power of community thinking. It’s like “I scratch your back, and you scratch mine”, and BOOM!, you have 10.000 followers. They are part of circles like #TeamFollowBack which is a group of young Tweeps that is following each other. Classic phenomenon. Grown ups would never think of that…

Here is an example of one of their jokes:

Here are their latest Tweets:

[answername 34] has got [answercount 34] votes, which is [answerpercent 34]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Marie-Joe used to be the youngest person on the list, and she still is the youngest person with a personal twitter account on this list. She is 15 years old, and a sworn Justin Bieber fan. For those who don’t know what this means, we can tell you that this is a world wide phenomenon that has turned into some sort of a teenage subculture that crosses any cultural borders in the world today. These kids calls themselves “Beliebers”, and are joining their forces to become super powerful on Twitter. It’s like democracy in a way, where the leader is a soft love song singing American Teenage dude with awesome karma. That’s all it takes, really.

But we have to admit that we at 2famous.TV got surprised when we first discovered her on the list. Not so much by the fact that she was there, but more because we should have known that Justin has a solid foot planted in Lebanon too.

Anyways, Marie-Joe is the most influential teenager on Twitter in Lebanon, so we decided to meet up with her for a little chat. And again, our own prejudges slapped us across the face, as we somehow secretly expected to meet a crazy girl wearing 200 pictures of Bieber all over, or something like that… But how uneducated and ignorant we were at the 2famous.TV office to underestimate the most powerful people on the internet today! Shame on us!! Marie-Joe is a down to earth, mature and intelligent teenager with a heart for Twitter. She isn’t in love with Justin, but she likes his music and think that he is a great role model.

And if you are wondering how she can reach to the top ten on Twitter in the country with “only” 8000 followers, we can reveal an explanatory secret: She is followed by Justin Bieber himself! Yeah, that’s right, the most famous teenager ever to have existed, the man with billions of YouTube hits, the ultimate teenage girls secret crush follows Marie-Joe on Twitter! He knows who she is. And perhaps this is the explanation to why she is so real and down to earth. No need to stress around when Justin Bieber is following you, right?

Well, to be honest, we don’t know all that much about Justin Bieber, but having met Marie-Joe makes us think that she would make a great role model for other teenagers. And if Beiber influenced her in this direction, he must be doing something good.

Here are her latest Tweets:

[answername 36] has got [answercount 36] votes, which is [answerpercent 36]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Suzanne is a poet and artist that blogs mostly in Arabic. These are great news for the Arabic readers, but it totally sucks for us, as we really don’t understand anything from what she is doing. But she must be doing something pretty fucking good when she claims the 11th position on this list, something that many of the greatest pop stars in this country can only dream of.

On her profile picture you can see some jewelry with a picture of a deer inside of it. Next to it there are some beads on top of a yellowish knitted pice of fabric. We don’t know what this means, but since it’s the only thing we have to go by, we will give it a shot. Besides, they say that a picture can tell more than a thousand words, which would be about 31 tweets (if the average word is 4,2 characters).

The deer symbolizes an innocent dreamy future, trapped in a glass bubble to be worn around someones neck till the end of time, like a prisoner of beauty. The yellowish fabric symbolizes our society’s constructed need to cover our skin, here presented as a backdrop for everything. Almost blending in, at least color wise, is the gold, which symbolizes the fuel that fires the engine of humanity. But it’s not only gold and money that has taken our spices as it’s prisoners. Here the gold is a piece of jewelry that decorates the trapped innocent deer and turns it into a symbol of status and beauty, something we are sure Suzanne can identify with. But the fact that the actual deer is surrounded by a thin layer of silver, not gold as the rest of the jewelry, makes it obvious that the deer, which is the main subject of the jewelry, is being discriminated against by the gold that rules the world. The beads dancing in over the top left corner is our religion.

However, sometimes she writes in English:

That’s how famous Suzanne is; she can’t even be bothered to go to TV interviews, which kind of means her followers gets exclusive information, in a way…

Here are her latest Tweets:

12 – Nadine Moawad
World Twitter Ranking: 80,636 – down 1000
Follow @nmoawad

[answername 37] has got [answercount 37] votes, which is [answerpercent 37]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Nadine is an activist, and her agenda with Twitter is to make Lebanon a better place. She sees herself as engulfed in a sea of sexism, which must be really annoying when your agenda is to fight such things.

She uses Twitter to communicate with co-activists and friends, as well as sharing information about humanitarian and social issues. If you’re interested in such things, Nadine will provide you with links to relevant reading, events, demonstrations, etc.

She encourages people to pick up their voices to protest for the causes that they are burning for. She is good at engaging with her followers, and her twitter account is a good resource for updates on cool and interesting blogs.

Here is an excellent Beginners Guide to Twitter that she did for her blog.

Here are her latest Tweets:

13 – Rania Barghout
World Twitter Ranking: 85,414 – up 5000
Follow @raniabarghout

[answername 38] has got [answercount 38] votes, which is [answerpercent 38]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Rana tweets in Arabic, so it’s hard for us to understand what is on her agenda, but we guess that she is pretty good at what she’s doing: In just a few weeks she climbed 5000 places on the World Twitter Ranking algorithm!! On her Facebook page she has more than 38000 likes, and she has a fan page for her photography.

From the pictures she publish she seems very nice, and it looks like she has a dog and her own TV-show! It seems she is into tweeting her own photos and updating her followers on what she is doing, as long as they are into reading in Arabic.

Here are her latest Tweets:

[answername 39] has got [answercount 39] votes, which is [answerpercent 39]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Actress, Johnny Walker icon and international superfamous filmmaker, Nadine Labaki gives you her latest updates on Twitter. At the moment of writing this, she is attending a film festival in San Francisco.

However, the tweets from the festivals tend to be a tad dry, so we prefer her more personal tweets that she usually does when she’s in Lebanon.

Breaking things down to 140 characters on Twitter must have been a challenge for Nadine, who is used to making feature films about important social issues. Nevertheless, she masters the minimalistic communication system. Sometimes she tweets interviews done with her so that her fans can get to know her better, which is pretty much how we do it at 2famous.TV as well (though we tend to write our own articles about us). In Italian Vouge she was quoted saying:

And with almost 100k followers on Facebook, and her own YouTube cannel, Nadine has an incredible reach! 2Famous.TV wouldn’t be surprised if filmmaker icon number #1 in Lebanon will be ranked even higher next time! Way to go Nadine! We support you all the way!

Here are her latest Tweets:

[answername 40] has got [answercount 40] votes, which is [answerpercent 40]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Bad as Electro Pop superstar Slutterhouse is registered in Paris/Beirut, but as a result of tedious research and hard work, 2Famous.TV has been able to track down that he mostly tweets from Beirut.

When 2famous.TV made a video from one of his rare concerts in Lebanon we observed him checking for mentions only minutes before going on stage. Slutterhouse tweets rhymes on the go, as well as crazy quotes that he makes up.

He tweets in a rockstar manner that can be shocking to some, but nevertheless, Slutterhouse is indeed a good Tweep that often shares his personal matters with his fans. Like this tweet from when he hit the wall a few weeks ago:

Slutterhouse uses Twitter to communicate with his fans, and, unlike other superstars, he hardly ever spams about his own albums, or whatever. Some circles claims that he was the first to bring TweetDeck to Lebanon, a software for professional Tweeps.

He is also an excellent drunkard tweeter.

Here are his latest Tweets:

16 – Ragheb Alama – NEW!!!
World Twitter Ranking: 95,558 – NEW!!!
Follow @raghebalama

[answername 41] has got [answercount 41] votes, which is [answerpercent 41]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

OH Boy, did we get surprised to see Ragheb on the list, or what!?

To be honest, we had never heard about this man until he suddenly popped up on the list with an impressive close to quarter of a million followers! If this list had been based on the amount of followers that you have, not your followers impact, Ragheb would have been fighting with the Queens of Twitter in Lebanon for the glorious 2famous.TV throne. On FaceBook he has 11,500 likes on his page.

Ragheb is tweeting mostly in Arabic, and the internet in Lebanon is so slow that it’s virtually impossible for us to check him out on YouTube, so it’s a bit hard for us at 2famous.TV to get to know him. (It took us three days to upload the video in this article.) Perhaps his regional limitation is what’s limiting his reach, which in return gives him a lower ranking in the algorithm.

However, although we can’t understand his tweets, nor watch his videos, it’s easy to see that he is a pop star from his webpage! He gets a lot of retweets, and this one got favorized 25 times:

Thanks for changing you location so that we got to know about you bro! Keep it real!

Here are her latest Tweets:

17 – Nancy Ajram – NEW!!!
World Twitter Ranking: 102,979 – NEW !!!
Follow @nancyajram

[answername 42] has got [answercount 42] votes, which is [answerpercent 42]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

What a super hot superstar Nancy Ajram is! She is a pop star of dimensions, and she is the goodwill ambassador for UNICEF! But however big she is, it is pretty obvious that she does not take Twitter too seriously. Yes, she has 100.000 followers, which is not half bad for a star. But when you rank at number 17 on this list, which could have been all yours, you’re doing something wrong… On FaceBook on the other hand Nancy has an impressive 3 million likes on her page, which is three times of what Haifa has.

She is informing her fans about her whereabouts; Now we know that she just finished her tour and needs a week to rest. But we don’t feel that we really know her, like we know Haifa.

She has enormous potential, and all she really has to do to knock Haifa off the top of Twitter in Lebanon is to go a tad more personal, and post “Vote for met at 2famous.TV” on her FaceBook page.

Anyways, every once in a while she tweets with her fans:

Here are her latest Tweets:

18 – Aarifa Abeda
World Twitter Ranking: 103,121 – down 4500
Follow @aarifaabeda

[answername 43] has got [answercount 43] votes, which is [answerpercent 43]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Her badge says: I am a sexy girl, but I am very smart. I pay much attention to politics and celebrities here and abroad. I follow back.

And she isn’t joking. If you follow her tweets you will se that she tweets links to interesting stories from around the world. She also puts in a quote once in a while:

But that’s pretty much it. She’s great to follow if you are interested in reading the articles that she likes reading, but it sort of stops there. We don’t know much about this woman, and her Twitter account is for sure not helping us to become her friend.

Here are her latest Tweets:

[answername 44] has got [answercount 44] votes, which is [answerpercent 44]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Rula is a journalist and tweets mostly news from the region. She is a correspondent for Al Jazeera International in Beirut.

Rula is ON, and it seems smart to follow her if you want to get the news before everyone else does. At least when she’s working, and that seems to be pretty much all the time. She is also good at selecting interesting articles to retweet, and she helps activists promote their causes every once in a while.

She is not shy to retweet whenever there is a revolution going on, like this one:

Here are her latest Tweets:

[answername 45] has got [answercount 45] votes, which is [answerpercent 45]% of all the 2famous.TV votes.

Assaad is sometimes a social media consultant, sometimes a journalist and blogger, writing about Lebanon & Middle Eastern political affairs. He also expresses his religious and social views on his blog.

He tweets links to information and often includes personal comments. The Twitter account has the same name as the blog, so they probably promote each other. Just like 2famous.TV is called 2famousTV on Twitter.

Here are his latest Tweets: