Bill who? Winston Peters the king of Facebook

NZ First leader Winston Peters. Bay of Plenty Times Photograph by George Novak

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has long known how to generate a headline and new statistics show that has translated to social media.

Ahead of tomorrow's Budget, Facebook has released data on what New Zealanders have liked, commented on and shared the most in the past four weeks.

The break-down on anonymised data released by the company includes an analysis of which politician's Facebook page has had the most total interactions - likes, comments, shares - in the 30 days prior to Budget week.

Peters is number one, beating out Prime Minister Bill English (2), Labour leader Andrew Little (3), Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett (4) and Act leader David Seymour (5).

In terms of straight 'likes', English has 89,000, Peters 77,000 and Little close to 32,000.

Facebook also analysed which politician had the highest interaction rate over the same period (interactions relative to fan base).

That "per capita" measure opened the field to lesser known politicians and at number one was new Defence Minister and Rodney MP Mark Mitchell.

He was followed by National and Whangarei MP Dr Shane Reti, Green MP Eugenie Sage, National list MP Parmjeet Parmar and Labour and Napier MP Stuart Nash.

Facebook said 410,000 Kiwis had interacted with Budget-related topics, such as taxation and debt, in the four weeks. It listed the top Budget-related topics as the Budget (35 per cent), economy (28 per cent), housing (28 per cent), education (27 per cent), social development (26 per cent) and immigration (22 per cent).

Facebook said 2.9 million New Zealanders are regularly active on the social media platform.