Mashable just released a summary of the top 10 influencers on Facebook. Although the list included a few obvious selections (Barack Obama’s on there? No way!), it did include more than a few suprises, including:
1. George Takei — One could argue that Mr. Takei had never been an A-list celebrity his entire career, but his hilarious posts, memes and videos are shared and reshared millions of times every day. Mr. Takei has also become something of a Facebook activist, taking a hard, and public, stand against individual, “promoted” posts.
2. Richard Metzger — If George Takei was an activist against promoted posts, Richard Metzger was the man that started the movement. His article on the decline of the Dangerous Minds was the first to offer evidence that Facebook was no longer bringing the traffic it should to Pages.
3. God — Yes, that God. As Facebook’s content sorting algorithm, Edgemark, became more discriminating, religious-themed groups such as Godvine were one of the few to expand engagement as high as 60%. With 3,211,772 likes, no one is quite sure how this happened but it’s an interesting development to say the least.
4. Mike Huckabee — The only reason Mike Huckabee made the list was for his “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day”. His battle cry to support the restaurant was answered, with massive lines forming outside Chick-fil-A locations and the company having its most successful sales day of all time. While no one has successfully imitated this style of protest yet, it’s only a matter of time given the power of Facebook.
5. Shaheen Dhada — Like most users, Shaheen used her Facebook to gripe about political decisions (in this case the decision not to honor the death of a controversial Indian politician). Unlike most Facebook users however, the 21-year old was arrested soon after and charged with violating the Information Technology Act, an act with broad powers to curtail any online activity that might destabilize the government. Her arrest led to international calls to reform and legislation within the Indian parliament to shorten the reach of the Act.
Those were the top surprises for 2012. Are there any major influencers that you think were left off the list?