14 DAY TRIAL // Lady Gaga goes from strength to strength backed by a strong and coherent online presence. She engages with the fans and uses YouTube to promote her lengthy videos that are rarely played in their entirety on TV. So it’s not much of a surprise that she becomes the first, living, person to break through the 10 million Facebook fans milestone.
The artist left other strong contenders for the ‘title’ behind and has passed by the 10 million fans mark yesterday. The number is still growing and is now close to 10.7 million fans. She managed to get almost two million new fans in the past two months, an average of 140,000 fans each day, and the trend shows no sign of stopping.
On her way to reaching the milestone she managed to leave US president Barack Obama behind. The president is close to the 10 million mark himself, but is still a couple of hundred of thousands of fans short. You can expect Obama to hit the milestone within a couple of days too, or even sooner.
However, both have a long way to go to compete with the late Michael Jackson who is very close to having 15 million Facebook fans. So, does all of this actually mean anything? Well, if nothing else, it shows that Facebook is still going strong and that engagement is growing at a tremendous rate. The recently introduced ‘like’ terminology seems to have done the trick as it looks like plenty of popular Facebook Pages are getting more ‘likes’ than they were ‘fans.’
Regardless of you personal feelings about social networking, you can’t discount Facebook. The social network has had a tremendous effect on the web and on culture in general. And for celebrities and public figures, it has become an indispensable tool for connecting with their public. An interesting aspect of this is that, for the first time in history, Facebook provides a measurable counter of a celebrity’s popularity, the number of fans that ‘like’ their Facebook Page.