InsideFacebook, one of the best blogs dedicated to Facebook, just released a new metrics product that tracks the popularity of Facebook Pages (also known as “public profiles”). PageData tracks the most popular pages on Facebook, as well as the daily and weekly top gainers and losers. Barack Obama’s page is by far the most popular Facebook page with close to 6 million fans, while Coca-Cola, Nutella, and a page about Pizza follow with around 3 million fans.
Brands Are Losing Control
Of course, the interesting fact about the Coca-Cola page is that it wasn’t even created by the Coca-Cola company, but by two fans (according to AdAge, there are now over 250 Coca-Cola fan pages on Facebook). Indeed, looking at some of the other top pages like the Nutella page, we are quite sure that it wasn’t created by Ferrero either (and neither was the Ferrero Rocher page, for that matter).
Popular Pages
As we explained in detail last week, Facebook Pages are not without problems. Over time, Facebook will merge these public profile pages with the standard Facebook profiles, but for now, they are an integral part of the Facebook experience and are very popular with brands and advertisers, though judging from the PageData statistics, Facebook’s users are also using them heavily as alternatives to Facebook groups.
PageData makes it possible to keep an eye on which campaigns are succeeding, but also to track developing (and dying) memes on Facebook, as the most interesting data is not so much in the leaderboard, but in the lists of top gainers and losers.
Here are a few other facts we noticed while looking at this data:
- There are a high number of pages in languages other than English among the top gainers.
- A large number of the top gaining pages do not belong to public figures or brands (which was the reason why pages were introduced in the first place), but are ‘novelty’ pages like ‘pizza,’ ‘cuddles in bed,’ ‘ice cream,’ ‘dormir,’ or ‘Los besos no se piden, se dan…’
- FML (FMyLife.com) was already quite popular, but over the last few days, it managed to add more than 100,000 new fans every day
