An interest in using Facebook to help advertise an evangelistic website led me to do a little investigating into some things on the site that you might not realise.
By now most of us know that Facebook started as first a Harvard website, and then the Ivy League schools, then America, then the world. But who is on Facebook now? And who uses Facebook. The answer might surprise you.
If you are on Facebook you have probably registered as a ‘Fan’ of a page of some sort. Well, you can have a look at the pages, broken up into categories to see which are the most popular things or people that Facebook users are fans of.
By now most everyone has heard of how Barack Obama used Facebook to build up a legion of fans (at latest count 5,856,606 supporters), only about 5 million more than number two on the list – John McCain, who is just ahead of Sarah Palin, poor old Joe Biden languishes down in tenth spot. But who is in number four and number 7? Well, it is the same person for a start and he has been dead for half a century (There are two pages for him). Okay, who’s guessing now that it is Winston Churchill? You’d be dead wrong? JFK? Nope. It is none other than the founder of the modern nation of Turkey – Mustafa Kemal Ataturk with 465,431 and 261,184 supporters respectively on those two pages.
Okay, so I’ve given you one surprise. do I have any more? Well, what do you think the most popular sports team would be on Facebook? Given its American roots you might suggest a baseball, basketball or American football team, but the most popular American team is the New York Yankees, which is only 15th most popular overall with 244,000 fans. If you’re smart you will know that the global game is soccer and would suggest probably the most famous soccer team in the world – Manchester United. With that guess you’d be very close. Manchester United has 679,748 fans, which is just fewer than the 686,488 fans of Fenerbahce. “Fenerbahce, who are they?!” I hear you say. Well, if you were Turkish you would know that they are one of the top Turkish soccer teams.
The other language which makes a big impression on the Facebook pages is rather more predicably Spanish. (Given that Spanish is spoken in most of Latin America, and actually the names of these pages may even be the same in Portuguese which adds a few hundred million Brazilians to the mix as well.) The most popular TV programme is Los Simpsons (1.9 million) with almost twice as many fans as The Simpsons (1.0 million). The most popular service is Dormir (2.0 million) which is Spanish for sleep.
There are more peculiarities in the Facebook pages. The number three TV programme is House with 1.6 million fans. But the number one celebrity with 2.7 million fans is Dr. House, and the number two shop with 1.5 million fans is Dr Gregory House. Poor old Hugh Laurie has to settle for only 428,000 fans.
BobMarley (omitting the space is important) the shop has 1.7 million fans (and in number one). Bib Marley Foundation in Lebanon has 100,000 fans and Bob Marley songs the musician has only 40,000 fans.
The most popular organisation is Ka’aba – The House of Allah with 800,000 fans, and there are several other Muslim religious organisations in the most popular list. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the university student origins of Facebook, Alcool and Getting Drunk! are two of the three most popular non-Muslim religious organisations. I Love Jesus runs in third place.
Perhaps more expected are McDonald’s and Coca-Cola being the most popular restaurant and food respectively.
Still, for me, the real surprise in this is the dominance of the Turkish community on Facebook. English and Spanish are global languages so it can be expected that pages for speakers of these languages will dominate, but Turkish is spoken outside of Turkey mainly in immigrant communities in Germany and other countries. It is definitely a surprise for me to see Turkish pages featuring so prominently.
You can find all this information and more yourself at www.facebook.com/pages.
