El-Baradei, the former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is widely believe to be preparing a run for the Egyptian presidency in the country's upcoming elections. The only significant challenger to President Hosni Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), El-Baradei has made extensive use of online social networks to rally Egyptians behind him and generate interest in a potential run.

"There are around three million Egyptians on Facebook so having about 5% of them is significant," said Gaith Saqer, founder and editor of ArabCrunch, which seeks to provide objective coverage of technology and social media in the Arab world. "We don't know whether or not the people following El-Baradei on Facebook support him, they may just want to see what's happening. But it also is possible that most people are supporters, and certainly the comments on his page support this idea."  Yet others say being popular on the Internet is no indication one can get elected.

From presidents and prime ministers to a queen and dictators of all varieties, there has been an increasing penetration of Arab political leaders on Facebook profiles, blogs and 'tweets' popping up across the Middle East.

Launched only three months ago, El-Baradei has over 200,000 fans on Facebook at the time of writing. This is just a couple thousand more than Jordan's trendy and widely-admired Queen Rania, who was a trendsetter among Arab leaders trying to develop an online presence and still is by far the most popular "tweeting" Arab leader.

"El-Baradei's page is in Arabic, not English, so he wants to reach the grassroots in Egypt about local issues," Saqer told The Media Line. "Queen Rania, on the other hand, is in English, and she is addressing both local and global issues."

While El-Baradei has claimed the Arab world's Facebook crown, he is far behind the Jordanian queen on other social networks. He has almost 48,000 YouTube followers and only 7,000 followers on Twitter. This figure is chump change when compared to Queen Rania, who in less than a year has garnered more than 1.2 million Twitter followers by personally writing updates and posting pics, providing guarded personal insights into the Jordanian royal family's life.

Queen Rania also boasts 198,000 fans on her Facebook profile and another 27,000 on her YouTube channel.