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ocial media giant Twitter has crowned president-elect Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo as winner of what it called its '€œTwitter Election'€ by becoming the most talked-about political candidate on the micro-blogging site.

In a statement, Twitter said that of the more than 95 million election-related tweets published since the start of the year to election day on July 9, Jokowi topped the list with more than 22 percent of the tweets mentioning the popular Jakarta governor.

Jokowi also topped the list of biggest gainers on the website by currently commanding more than 1.87 million twitter followers, an increase of 880,000 followers since the start of the year.

Twitter also found from its statistics that many more Indonesians followed Jokowi'€™s account and participate in live, public conversations with their newly elected leader.

Jokowi'€™s statement after being declared victor by the General Elections Commission (KPU) on Tuesday was retweeted over 15,000 times within the first eight hours after it went live.

'€œThank you God. Thank you people of Indonesia. Forget number 1, forget number 2 and let us put the nation first. We have a tremendous task ahead of us,'€ Jokowi said through his Twitter handle
@jokowi_do2 on Tuesday.

From supporting their candidates to breaking news to discussing political issues to fact-checking information, Twitter has been the media that many users relied on.

Throughout the day on July 9, Jokowi became the subject of Twitter conversations in over 1 million tweets, peaking at 3:29 p.m. Jakarta time with 2,136 tweets per minute, 50 percent higher than the conversations about his rival, the Gerindra Party'€™s Prabowo Subianto.

Since election day, political conversations continued to rage on Twitter with several local hashtags topping the Twitter trending topics chart, such as #KawalKPU (Protect the General Elections Commission), #7okowipresident (Jokowi for 7th President of Indonesia) and #damai_untuknkri (peace for the homeland).

Hashtags are conversation topics that any Twitter user can append to their tweets in order to join in on a conversation in real time.

A number of world leaders also took to Twitter to congratulate the new president-elect, such as Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Norwegian Ambassador Stig Traavik.

'€œCongratulations to @jokowi_do2. Look forward to working with him to strengthen Indonesia-S'€™pore relations. '€“ LHL,'€ reads the tweet from Prime Minister Lee.

Meanwhile, Kerry congratulated Jokowi through the US State Department'€™s Twitter handle @StateDept, while appending an official statement that is also available on the US Government website.

'€œI warmly congratulate Indonesia'€™s president-elect Joko Widodo. The people of Indonesia united once again to show their commitment to democracy through free and fair elections,'€ said Kerry, adding that the US looked forward to deepening its partnership with the country.

In the meantime, Facebook has also been widely used as a platform for many conversations about election day.

According to Yustina Tantri, a spokeswoman from media monitoring agency Awesometrics, the #PresidenBaru (New President) hashtag was shared on Facebook a day before the KPU was slated to announce its official results.

Yustina said that Awesometrics researchers found there were three conversations using the hashtag on July 21, which then ballooned to 170 conversations the following day.

'€œAs of Wednesday morning, there were 169 Facebook statuses using the #PresidenBaru hashtag,'€ Yustina stated in a press release on Wednesday.

One of the numerous Facebook users whose status was highly commented on was vice president-elect Jusuf Kalla. His status about the KPU'€™s final vote-count result was commented on 1,524 times and shared 392 times on Facebook. (tjs)