If you thought popularity contests were limited to schools, proms and student council elections – think again. They also are showing up in the form of fans on social networking site Facebook (News - Alert).
According to the most recent friend counts, Lady Gaga has stepped down from her throne as the all-hailing queen of Facebook and has been replaced by another pop star and trend-setter, Rihanna.
Lady Gaga’s undefeated 40,586,649 Facebook fans has been trumped by Rihanna’s 40,557,406– almost 30,000 more.
In Twitter (News - Alert) land, however, Gaga still reigns as No. 1, with a whopping 11.6 million followers, followed closely by teen heart-throb Justin Bieber, who has 11 million. As for Rihanna, she just can’t keep up with her pop star counterparts, with (only?) 6.1 million followers.
One of the most recent additions to Tumblr, Gaga was the first living music artist to achieve 10 million Facebook fans, even beating out President Barack Obama by about 700,000, according to Mashable.
It’s no secret that social media is a tried and true method of gauging a trending individual or topic’s success. With last night’s premiere of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2,” there was certainly a surge of activity across all social media boards.
According to Mashable, nearly 29 million users have “liked” the Harry Potter Facebook page, many of which clicked the thumbs-up sign in the last week. In fact, in the week before the premiere, Harry Potter’s Facebook page acquired almost 100,000 new fans daily.
As of today, the Harry Potter Film’s account on Twitter, @HarryPotterFilm, has quickly gained almost 350,000 followers. And, several of Potter’s castmates made it into Friday’s trending topics, including “Gryffindor” and “Rebekah Brooks.” While we can’t be sure if Harry Potter cast a spell on Twitter, one thing is for certain – the numbers don’t lie.
Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Jamie Epstein
