24 Oct Do Dating Site Fans Have Fewer Facebook Friends? Do Sneaker Lovers Have More Friends?
Recently released research in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society found that people with more Facebook friends have different brain structure than those with fewer friends. Specifically, researchers found differences in the superior temporal sulcus, left middle temporal gyrus and entorhinal cortex. I personally have no idea what those areas actually are, but fortunately those braniacs do:
“We found that variation in the number of friends on Facebook strongly and significantly predicted grey matter (in these parts),” the report, from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said. “The size of an individual’s online social network is closely linked to brain structure and social cognition.”
That got me wondering: Do the Top 50 Branded Facebook Fan Pages attract people with different numbers of friends? Do the “cool kids” gather around one kind of page, while the “loners” gather around others?
Pages Whose Fans Have The Most Friends
For the answer to that question, we turned to our friends at Expion, 
the social media management tool, and we analyzed the Top 50 fan pages from September 2011. First, we analyzed each page to look at their active fans between August 15, 2011 and October 15, 2011. Expion was able to analyze the average number of friends per active fan that each page has, and the findings are interesting and potentially amusing (even if they are not likely to be scientifically lauded for relevance).
Before we start, you should know that:
- The average number of friends among active fans in the Top 50 pages was 295.40.
- The median number of friends among active fans in the Top 50 pages was 239.70.
Do Dating Site and Walmart Fans Have Fewer Friends?
Fans of the dating site Zoosk have fewer friends than any other page in the Top 50, averaging 172.62.
Walmart fans also don’t seem to a social bunch, averaging just 193.75 friends.
Fans of BMW also appear to have fewer friends, showing up in the bottom 10, averaging 204.04.
The 10 pages of the Top 50 with the fewest friends per active fan are:
- Zoosk, 172.62
- Disney, 186.97
- Kohl’s, 193.32
- Walmart, 193.75
- Xbox, 194.21
- Coca-Cola, 194.36
- Disneyland, 199.13
- Disney Pixar, 200.09
- Starbucks Frappuccino, 200.25
- BMW, 204.04
Do Sneaker Lovers and IMers Have More Friends than Normal?
Active fans of DC Shoes were by far the most popular, showing an average of 989.59 friends.
And sneakers dominated the top 10, with adidas Originals, Converse All Stars and Converse all making the Top 10.
In fact, here are the pages in the Top 50 Branded Facebook Fan Pages with the most average friends per active fan:
- DC Shoes, 989.59
- adidas Originals, 660.49
- Converse All Stars, 623.90
- Ferrero Rocher, 604.81
- Live Messenger, 556.39
- Converse, 517.48
- Hollister, 469.01
- H&M, 380.47
- Zara, 352.91
- Subway, 321.98
What Do You Think?
Does it make sense to you that certain pages would attract “more social” fans, while others would not? Or is this just simply meaningless? Let me know in the comments below.
