2010-02-18dated from the first comment; a lower bound

The Most Popular Facebook Pages in Ireland

Published no later than February 18, 2010, dated from the first comment on the original post. Platforms and services described here have changed. This is kept as a record, not as current advice.

Pete Warden is doing some excellent work on his blog with publicly available data on Facebook. He has crawled over 250 million public pages to gain insights into links between people, places and pages. Using some of the findings in his huge data set we can create a list of the most popular Facebook Pages with Irish users. So, without further delay, here’s the top 9: 9.

Tea Go on, go on, go on, go on! Total number of fans worldwide : 85,401 “ Whether you like tea with milk or without, with sugar or without or even with biscuits or not please feel free to become a fan 😀 xxx ” 8. Kings of Leon The first of three music pages to make the list. Worldwide fans : 2.25m 7. I hate people who clap when planes land Is it possible that this is a uniquely Irish thing?

Or do we just take too many Ryanair flights!? For something with a relatively small number of fans to rank so high the Irish must make up a large portion of the total. Worldwide fans : 280,000 “ This is the place to be for people who hate the randomers who start to clap on a plane when it lands. ” 6. Cheryl Cole The second musician’s page to make the list after Kings of Leon. For a current measurement and audience-data reference, see Plausible Analytics.

She’s probably much more popular than the average musician because of this island’s obsession with a certain TV show. Worldwide fans : 1.5m 5. I Can’t Wait For Christmas Surprised by the fact that something seasonal ranks so high? Don’t be! Summer is one of the most popular pages in the US, although it’s quite telling that the Irish summer doesn’t make the list!

Worldwide fans : 870,000 4. Social Interview The only fan page for an application to make the list, even beating out Farmville which has 20m fans. Worldwide fans : 2.4m 3. Guinness 250 Ireland The only company or brand to make the list, but deservedly so after such a great campaign this year. Worldwide fans: 86,000 2. The X Factor That the country is obsessed with X Factor should be a surprise to no one by now.

It also helps to explain how Cheryl Cole ranks so high. Worldwide fans: 913,000 1. Petition to have IRELAND Vs FRANCE REPLAYED!!! Ah Thierry Henry, you may have killed our World Cup dreams but you sure didn’t dampen our love of Facebook pages! Worldwide fans: 501,000 So there you have it. Facebook data shows that as a nation we love Tea, X Factor and shared outrage over sporting events.

Some points to note: This list is from a (rather large) sample of the Irish Facebook population, but the fan figures quoted above are total numbers, regardless of whether the fans pages are public or private. If all the fans of the number 1 page are Irish, this implies (combined with the latest figures from Mulley Communications) that almost half of all Irish Facebook users are fans of the page.

One can only assume the other half expressed their outrage by joining a similar Facebook group.