Shakira dubbed 'the Queen of Facebook'

Shakira dubbed 'queen of Facebook' with 100 million likes

 

Her hips don't lie -- and neither do her Facebook metrics. Shakira snagged the top "like" spot on Facebook with 100 million likes this week, a milestone lauded by the Wall Street Journal, which named her the social media giant's reigning "queen." "I can interact meaningfully with

[fans] on a regular basis and the response is immediate," the singer tells WSJ (via HuffPo).

"100 million fans on Facebook. I mean that is incredible," she said in a post to her fans on Friday. "Thank you so much for your support, for your loyalty, for your love. It's really unbelievable, thank you so much."

Still, along with her fame comes spam, fakes and other headaches

Shakira is about to hit 100,000,000 Facebook likes. Facebook

 

On New Year's Eve of 2008, Shakira's Facebook FB +3.03% account posted a blurry, amateurish photo of the pop star with the one-word caption "Rehearsing." In the foreground was the large figure of a man whose head is cut off by the top of the photo. According to Facebook metrics, in the week after it was posted, it drew two comments.

If you fast-forward by scrolling the timeline of Shakira's page all the way up to a week ago, you see a sharp photo of the smiling singer on the field at the World Cup. The photo has been liked more than 3.5 million times and is among the 10 most popular photos on Facebook ever.

Shakira attracts a world-beating 100 million social-media fans, but along with it comes spam, fakes and other headaches. Getty Images

In the five years between those two photos, Shakira's Facebook page has grown from 318,000 "likes" to 100 million—becoming the first page to do so. That's 8% of Facebook's universe of 1.28 billion monthly active users around the world.

Only Facebook's own brand page and mobile-app page have more people who have liked them. Shakira's page is known as a brand page to differentiate it from personal pages. Brand pages' popularity is measured by "likes," the number of people who have chosen to follow posts by the pages.

As such, it represents a microcosm of the Facebook experience for brands, both good and bad. It allows a huge international star to personally connect with an enormous community of engaged fans, at a level never seen. But it also hosts comments littered with porn and spam, and it attracts perhaps millions of fake user profiles.

Enlarge Image

This photo from the World Cup showing Shakira on the field has drawn 3.6 million Facebook likes, reflecting her international brand -- and soccer star boyfriend, Gerard Piqué. Shakira/Facebook

The marketing benefits are extensive: Her page links to iTunes, where fans can buy her music and videos, to her own website where they can buy merchandise, and to other sites where they can buy items such as her perfume. She can post her videos and promote TV appearances such as her role on "The Voice."

Asked via email about reaching the 100-million fan milestone, Shakira called it "just an unfathomable number." Having the most popular page on all of Facebook is "something I never necessarily anticipated but a really welcoming and heartwarming surprise." Yet her accomplishment didn't sneak up on her: She'd been posting certain benchmarks to her fans, like breaking 50 million, and becoming the biggest celebrity page on Facebook in March, when she passed fellow pop star Rihanna. She also got a huge boost from the World Cup, with which the singer has a long association, and where she performed at the closing ceremony in Rio earlier this month. The Cup generated 3 billion Facebook interactions (posts, comments, likes and shares) from 350 million people.

This blurry photo posted to Shakira's Facebook page on New Year's Eve 2008 drew just two comments at the time, when Shakira had 318,000 fans. She now has 300 times that. Shakira/Facebook

It is her international appeal, embodied by the soccer tournament, that has propelled her social-media success, says Jan Rezab, chief executive of the social-media metrics company Socialbakers. Just 11% of Shakira's fan base is in the U.S., compared with 17% for Rihanna and 25% for rapper Eminem, according to Socialbakers.

"That's unusual, definitely," said Mr. Rezab, whose team tracks social-media data for brands. Shakira's social-media team posts in English, Spanish, German, French, Russian and other languages. The singer, born Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll in Colombia to a father of Lebanese descent, is a global brand, with notable strength in Spanish-speaking countries and the Middle East.

She is also a personable one. The singer writes many of her own posts and takes some of her own photos—including pictures of her son, Milan, whose bath time photo from August 2013 drew 1.7 million likes, and more than 25,000 "shares," eliciting the same "awww" that baby photos on Facebook always do. Shakira signs many of her posts "Shak," meant to signify that she herself supplied the text, rather than her staff. Shakira has two assistants and a supervisor working with her on her Facebook account.

"I can interact meaningfully with (fans) on a regular basis," she said, "and the response is immediate." Socialbakers' data shows Shakira's page has four times more engagement—fans interacting with the page's content—than Eminem's.

Inevitably, there are problems in Facebook's largest community. Chief among them are spam links in the comments left on Shakira's posts. The cute photo of Shakira's son at bath time is marred by numerous comments promoting a spam link purporting to show the baby's mother in a "hooooot sexy bikini." The top comment on two of Shakira's posts this week greeted visitors to the page with a small photo of graphic pornography and a link to a porn site. The comments beneath her posts are littered with spam. Taking them all down, her team says, would be an impossible job.

"It would be pretty much a full-on 24/7 job to delete everything, and you'd still be fighting a losing battle," said Chris Salmon, a social-media editor on the singer's digital-marketing team. "It's something we try to keep an eye on and manage as much as we can."

There is also the issue of fake fans. Facebook estimates between 5.5% and 10% of its monthly active users are either duplicates, "undesirable" (spammers) or "user misclassified" (someone's cat with a Facebook page), according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That works out to between 70 million and 130 million accounts that aren't the main accounts of real people.

Internet-security researcher Andrea Stroppa, who has researched celebrity social media accounts, estimates that Shakira's page represents the same level of fakes as Facebook as a whole, with from 5 million to 10 million fakes. Spammers create these fake Facebook accounts, and then they charge to have those profiles like brand pages or engage with their content. This can cause sudden, implausible growth leaps for certain brand pages.

Some celebrity pages in this murky world have paid for this to boost their popularity, either directly or through third-party agencies. Mr. Stroppa says he has seen underground sellers charge as little as $1 for 1,000 likes to a brand page. Shakira's team says it has never paid to acquire fans, which is forbidden by Facebook's terms of service.

Accounts with a strong overseas following often have high levels of fake followers, Mr. Stroppa adds. This makes Shaikira's page especially vulnerable.

Facebook periodically purges some of these fake accounts. In 2012, Facebook deleted nearly 35,000 fans in one day from Shakira's account and more than 30,000 from the accounts of fellow pop stars Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, Socialbakers reported.

Mr. Rezab of Socialbakers called fake accounts on brand pages "unfortunately a natural part of the ecosystem."