Hugo Chávez celebrates accruing 1 million Twitter followers

In less than seven months, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has racked up more than 1 million followers on Twitter, using the medium to denounce an uprising in Ecuador, congratulate the election of new leftist president of Brazil, and announce business deals.

In May, he reportedly opened a special government department with 200 employees to handle his Twitter account. Since then, he's accrued an average of 4,600 new Twitter followers daily. Venezuela's opposition parties are also catching on to the power of social media. From their account @unidadvenezuela, they "waged a Twitter battle for influence" in September's legislative elections, as Agence France-Presse put it. It seems unlikely that Chávez was paying attention to their tweets. Perhaps signaling how important he thinks others' words are, he follows only 20 people on Twitter.