RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 20 – The United Nations has been running a social media campaign for Rio+20 with the entire U.N. system reaching an amazing number of people – and hundreds of millions of impressions.

“It’s the first time we have used social media in such a big way for a major U.N. conference,” a U.N. spokesperson told Terra Viva, “and it shows the very broad public engagement that Rio+20 has generated.”

 The #Rioplus20 hashtag showed a huge increase in reach this week to 46,557,666 people via 206,489 tweets with an exposure of 811,999,391 impressions.

 The latest report for the #futurewewant hashtag shows that it has now reached 26,179,318 people via 65,666 tweets with an exposure of 375,178,605 impressions.

 The “reach” refers to the number of unique users receiving #futurewewant; exposure refers to the overall number of times the # was received – known as impressions – which could be multiple per unique user.

 These figures reflect only the English Twitter campaign. There has also been a very big “Future We Want” campaign on Weibo reaching millions of people via Chinese celebrities like movie star Jackie Chan.

 There is also a big Brazilian campaign using local celebrities.