aNewDomain.net — And on the first day, the Pope tweeted. Call him the tech Pope.
As the net went wild with all the news surrounding new Roman Catholic pontiff Pope Francis I, who replaced Roman Catholic Pope Benedict officially March 14, 2013, the new techie Pope tweeted from the papal account @pontifex. And that first tweet went viral.
The tweet read HABEMUS PAPAM FRANCISCUM — translated into English from the Latin, that’s “We have Pope Francis.” There were nearly 70K retweets at this writing. Check this out.
The Pope’s tweet and his commentary from today is all over Twitter and Google+ — although Google’s announcement today that it is dumping Google Reader on July 1 overtook it several times today. But that’s another story — find that here.
The new Pope, previously known as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, is an Argentine who is tech-savvy and nuts for soccer, say reports. The Pontiff’s enthusiasm for sports and tech sets him apart, at least personality-wise, from the stern and aged previous Pope Benedict XVI, whose account hardly emerged with tweets at all.
While we update this story about the tech Pope and how he plans to leverage social media to reach his enormous following online and the whole of the Roman Catholic Church, check out a few Pope infographics we collected for you.
Here’s an infographic about the history of the papacy for all you history geeks out there.
Source of the History of the Papacy infographic: TommieMedia
Click here to see the entirety of that history of Popes infographic, via Heavy.com.
Pope Francis I has a suitable name if in fact he turns out to be the tech Pope he appears to be so far. St. Francis, after whom he is named in this papal role, is the patron saint of San Francisco : )
UPDATE: There’s a mighty fine USA Today piece on the tech savvy that apparently surrounds the new Pope. Analysts have lots of ideas on how Pope Francis I might use social media. here’s an excerpt from that piece. Find the whole piece here.
Michael Street, a New York-based social media strategist, says he sees Francis’ move to Twitter as an “outstanding” one. The pontiff can use the social media site to “spread the message he needs to spread … It would be really great if the pope pushed out messages on the Word,” Street says … “I would like to see him be active on the Twitter account,” Street adds. “I would like to see him take it seriously and create a strategy around how to leverage the message of the Vatican..
“On Sundays … he could even use his own hashtag to spread the message.
