Top 50 Branded Facebook Fan Pages of 2009

2009 will surely go down as the year of the branded fan page on Facebook. Corporations woke up to Facebook as a powerful CRM-tool and a great way to jump start all sorts of related promotions.

So if 2009 is the year of the branded fan page on Facebook, who is in the lead in terms of most fans? With data from InsideFacebook.com, I crawled through hundreds of pages, pulling out the top 50 corporate, official, Facebook fan pages, thereby creating The Ignite Top 50: The Leading Branded Facebook Fan Pages of 2009.

What's Not Included

Since at Ignite Social Media we're primarily interested in social media marketing by brands, I excluded fan pages that weren't official pages being used to promote a product. Specifically, I left out pages that featured:

• Celebrities (like Vin Diesel -- currently #2 overall)
• Politicians (like Barack Obama -- currently #3 overall)
• Musicians (like Michael Jackson -- currently #1 overall)
• Athletes (like Roger Federer -- currently #37 overall)
• Sports teams (like New York Yankees -- currently #386 overall)
• Comedians (like Adam Sandler -- currently #21 overall)
• Unbranded fan pages (like I ♥ SLEEP -- currently #10 overall)
• Facebook games or apps (like Mafia Wars -- currently #5 overall)
• Generic or unofficial product pages (like Freeze Pops -- currently #26 overall)
• Pages in languages other than English (like Musica En Tu Perfil -- currently #53 overall)

This is not to suggest that many of these are not "brands" in their own right, or that important marketing isn't behind their rise. But I wanted an apples-to-apples comparison comparing corporate marketers efforts to promote their products or brands. The other categories can be subjects of other blog posts. In fact, I've got a follow-up planned already for one of them.

The "Ignite Top 50": The Leading Branded Facebook Fan Pages of 2009

No real surprise that Facebook is number one (they have a bit of an advantage), but it might be a surprise that you need more than 800,000 fans to make the top 50 list for 2009. It also might surprise you that Victoria's Secret and Wrigley (the candy company) both hold two of the coveted top 25 spots--Wrigley owns both Skittles and Starburst. Apple and Microsoft are locked in a very close battle near the #10 spot, with Live Messenger battling iTunes.  And those strange little candies, Ferrero Rocher, are doing shockingly well, coming in at #12.  Take a look and then tell me: What surprised you?

1. Facebook: 6,572,828
2. Starbucks: 5,259,550
3. Coca Cola: 4,077,848
4. YouTube: 3,851,071
5. Skittles: 3,545,453
6. Disney: 3,038,122
7. Oreo: 2,880,294
8. Pringles: 2,802,303
9. iTunes: 2,635,610
10. Big Prize Giveaways: 2,622,566
11. Live Messenger: 2,484,312
12. Ferrero Rocher: 2,413,264
13. Victoria's Secret: 2,338,469
14. adidas Originals: 2,221,284
15. Red Bull: 2,139,357
16. Playfish: 1,811,554
17. NBA: 1,782,290
18. Zara: 1,692,296
19. Victoria's Secret Pink: 1,612,431
20. McDonalds: 1,514,627
21. Starburst: 1,506,993
22. H&M: 1,453,309
23. Reese's: 1,443,577
24. Apple Students: 1,429,668
25. Starbucks Frappuccino: 1,423,329
26. Kisses: 1,319,868*
27. Puma: 1,293,254
28. Subway: 1,255,066
29. Chick-fil-a: 1,243,599
30. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts: 1,182,378
31. Lacoste: 1,152,021
32. MTV: 1,146,716
33. Slurpee: 1,115,168
34. Kellogg's Pop-Tarts: 1,097,776
35. Vitamin Water: 1,094,946
36. Disneyland: 1,077,030
37. Pizza Hut: 1,070,998
38. Best Buy: 1,050,314
39. Chase Community Giving: 1,041,146
40. Dunkin Donuts: 1,028,499
41. Buffalo Wild Wings: 1,025,404
42. Breast Cancer Awareness: 1,017,813**
43. Ben & Jerry's: 991,178
44. Dr. Pepper: 941,392
45. Dippin' Dots: 907,897
46. Kohl's: 906,102
47. Disney Pixar: 893,527
48. 5 Gum: 869,800
49. Duck Tape: 825,895
50. Verizon: 814,388

(Notes: All numbers as of 12/29/09, roughly 3:00 p.m. eastern. *A controversial page, but it is owned and run by Orabrush. **Included because it's a marketing page for a non-profit.)

How to Grow Yours

A quick look at the list suggests a few ways to grow massive followings on Facebook. You can either:

• Be a deeply loved brand (like Coke);
• Be a quirky brand (like Duck Tape);
• Have the luxury of having taken over a fan-created page that did well (like Kisses); and/or
• Heavily market your page (as Skittles and Kohl's, among others, have done).

Clearly, no amount of marketing can get you fans if you don't have a good and faithful following, but some of the top 50 are not among the world's favorite brands. And some of the world's favorite brands haven't put the dollars and/or the creativity around growing fans that the top 50 have.

If you want to catch them, it won't be easy. In the three days that it took me to write this post, some of the pages added 100,000 new fans, and most added at least 3,000. Eight brands moved up the chart in that short time, including Pop-Tarts and Dunkin' Donuts, both of which jumped three spots.

Add to their size advantage my suspicion that it will get slightly harder to get new fans in 2010 as "news feed saturation" starts to wear on people. But these pages have a huge head start in the battle to convert Facebook fandom into marketing success.

Questions for you

• What brand were you most surprised to see in the top 50?
• What brand were you most surprised wasn't in the top 50?

Let us all know in the comments below.