Pope lays out concerns, petitions one tweet at a time, with ever growing following

August 24, 2013. (Romereports.com) A month after the end of WYD Rio 2013, the event's impact on the Pope's Twitter account is very noticeable. In August, the account @Pontifex grew by more than 585,000 followers. In the months before, the account added an average of 240,000 followers per month. In other words, during the month of August, it grew twice as fast.

This month, Pope Francis has issued tweets every other day, and several have been re-tweeted more than 13,000 times. 

His Latin profile is perhaps the biggest surprise of all. It grows by 200 followers daily, and is now in sixth place among the nine official @Pontifex accounts. So far, it has gathered 154,000 followers. That's a striking number, considering that the Vatican expected about 5,000 when they launched the account.

In August, Pope Francis' public appearances have trickled down, but not his activity on Twitter. In that time he was tuned in on how to reach the 500-million-strong Twitter universe. Those efforts are reciprocal. Catholics who want to know what the Pope expects of them simply have to read his messages on Twitter.