Starbucks is the world’s most popular social media consumer brand

Famecount.com, the first media measurement service to examine online popularity across multiple social media channels, announced today that Starbucks is social media’s most popular consumer brand.

So how does one determine the world’s most popular consumer brand? You analyze data from the top three social media sites – Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

In a study conducted on Wednesday, Starbucks had 7.4 million Facebook fans, 901,925 Twitter followers and 6,509 YouTube subscribers resulting in a Famecount index of 69.7 percent.

Coca-Cola (53.7 percent), Whole Foods Market (48.4 percent), Skittles (48.3 percent), and Oreo (48.1percent) round out the top five brands. Interestingly, food and drink brands accounted for six of the top ten. The highest ranked non-food or drink consumer brand was online shoe and clothing retailer, Zappos.com.

In a press release, Daniel Dearlove, founder of Famecount.com, explained the importance of the study,

This data is unique in that it gives us for the first time an accurate global ranking of the popularity of brands online. It is interesting to see established offline brands perform so strongly. This highlights the growing importance of social media in wider marketing campaigns, as well as the applicability of these channels to established brands, which may not have had a significant online presence previously. Social networks are helping them to tap into wider audiences and strengthen communications with existing consumers.”

The question is will corporate brands find this type of study useful? Is social media the new tool to measure brand equity, awareness and loyalty? In a sound-bite world… absolutely.

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