Who’s Famous on Social Media?

By: Avishek Ghosh, Kowoon Jeong, Baochao Gu, Siew Fen Eow

Introduction

Social media has become a huge part of our lives in the past decade. When we have a quick second break or boredom, we are quick to pull out our phones and scroll through social media feeds. So whose pictures and videos are viewed by everyone? To investigate this, the team explored this Kaggle dataset about the top 50 famous accounts on 5 social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok.

Famous Across Multiple Platforms

In this figure, we can see the people who are among the top 50 list on multiple social media platforms. It is interesting that mostly only singers and football players/teams make it to this list, suggesting the global popularity of the sport and pop music. Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, and Katy Perry, and Selena Gomez are popular on the highest number of social media platforms. However, it is Cristiano Ronaldo who has the highest total followers by a very large margin of almost 150M. Despite being in the top 50 for only 2 social media platforms, @Instagram has the second-highest total number of followers, suggesting a strong liking for the vibrant pictures posted by them.

Countries Analysis

The United States has a major global influence. This is extremely evident from most of the famous people on Facebook and Instagram as well as Twitter and Tiktok being from the United States.

With most social media platforms being banned in China, it is interesting to find quite a few Chinese Facebook pages among the top 50. With a closer look at the dataset, it is Chinese news reporting pages that have gained such a huge following on Facebook.

The interesting exception in the distribution for countries is YouTube, where there are a large number of channels from India. The rise in Indian channels is only a recent trend with a notable event occurring a few years ago where there was a prolonged subscriber battle between PewDiePie and T-Series for the highest subscribed channel title.

Considering TikTok is a Chinese app, it is surprising to not find any top TikTok account being from China. This could be due to the fact that China has its own version of Tiktok called “Douyin”. In fact, Tiktok is an international version of Douyin which had a release after Douyin. In 2021, Douyin had 600 million users, all being from Mainland China, whereas TikTok had 1 billion users, from over 150 countries.

Profession Analysis

Overall, the music collected the most followers and subscribers across different social media platforms amongst the existing professions. In comparison to how Facebook and Instagram showcase the ranking of individual accounts, YouTube channels are grouped into bigger categories. For example, entertainment channels (the 2nd most count within Top 50 YouTube channels) can be subdivided into actor/actress, television personality, model, comedian, etc. Thus, the following table of YouTube well represents broad areas that are most popular online while the table for Facebook and Instagram depicts individual professions that gain the most followers amongst online users.

With top professions on Facebook and Instagram, we can look more closely at specific careers that celebrities hold. In comparison between Facebook and Instagram, actors/actresses and football players were two common professions that ranked high on both platforms. However, the next two most popular professions in Facebook were ‘product,’ and ‘services,’ which include companies such as Samsung, Coca-Cola, and YouTube. It is evident that Facebook has become a social media where big industries can promote their products and increase sales.

The following bar chart that shows the top professions among top 50 Instagram accounts includes a more diverse group of careers. Because Instagram was first developed to enable any users from sharing their images and videos, it was more welcoming for people with different professions. Moreover, it was easier for individuals to gain popularity on Instagram unlike YouTube and Facebook, where celebrities and large corporations were being promoted.

Whilst the popularity of the sport football and its players is evident from the bar charts for Instagram and Facebook, there are surprisingly few sports channels famous on YouTube. This suggests that while there may be many viral sports videos, there is no centralized place where sports watchers and fans can consistently go on YouTube.

Compared to other social media platforms, TikTok does not have a bias for celebrities and mostly individual content creators have risen to the top. This is evident with over 80% of famous TikTokers being called social media personalities. Whilst the individual content creators may not be celebrities, they often use music and audio from famous songs and movies, making their success partially related to those famous on other social media platforms.

Conclusion

Analyzing who is famous on social media reveals the popularity of music and sports. For many people, social media, music, and sports are large and important components of their lives. Much like the weather, these are also conversation starters and topics.

Our team hopes that this article can help shed some light on who is famous on different social media, and hopefully make us more aware of our feed consumption.

The link to our Github repository can be found here.