Consumer brands virtually absent from Facebook and Instagram Top 100

Last week I explained the numbers behind Twitter users, based on available information online.

Each month I take a cursory look into the top couple of hundred social media sites to see if consumer brands are making any inroads. And each month nothing surprises, as not much really changes.

The one thing it does reinforce is that the most popular sport in the world is, and always will be, people watching. It seems our fascination with celebrity is insatiable. And it’s why social media will primarily be a social channel rather than a business channel for consumer brands.

Instagram is not as easy to categorise as Facebook or Twitter, as there are accounts that are not always easy to define. Some describe themselves as actors and models, or actors and musicians, or TV stars and models, so I may have put one or two in categories that don’t represent their primary skill – so to speak.

Here’s the most recent summary of the Top 100 Instagram accounts. The only international consumer brand is Victoria Secrets – which I suspect has lots of young male followers who aren’t really customers. There is also a huge bias to American accounts.

The training videos refer to bloggers of nail polish and make-up application lessons. The top account in Instagram is Instagram itself with 65+ million followers, while the second highest is Justin Bieber with 23+ million. The 100th account has 4+ million followers:

• Musicians – 28
• Actors – 18
• Vacuous celebrities – 13
• Models – 11
• Sportspeople – 9
• Sports clubs/brands – 7
• Social media brands – 4
• Fashion retailers – 4
• Training videos – 3
• Magazines – 2
• TV Shows – 1

Here’s the latest list of Top 100 Facebook accounts. The top 3 accounts are Facebook accounts with 534 million+ down to 161 million+ followers. The next is Cristiano Rinaldo with 102 million+, while the 100th account is the TV show The Big Bang Theory with 32 million+ followers.

Interestingly there are two accounts of dead people – Michael Jackson and Bob Marley. And Bob died before the internet was invented.

There are only 7 consumer brands in the Top 100 – apart from Red Bull, they are all American global brands that have spent $millions on their accounts: McDonald’s, KFC, Oreo, Pepsi, Starbucks, Walmart and Red Bull.

• Musicians – 39
• TV Shows – 13
• Sportspeople – 9
• Intanet/social media brands – 8
• Actors/Celebrities – 9
• Movies – 8
• Consumer brands – 7
• Sports clubs/brands – 6
• Politicians – 1

Here’s links to the Instagram and Facebook resources.

The concern of course, is for the future of marketing. Global brands have a collective marketing budget of $billions and thousands of degree-qualified marketing staff to do their bidding. Yet only 7 brands are in the Top 100 FB accounts and handful of lingerie/fashion brands are in the Top 100 Instagram accounts.

Yet the musicians, celebrities, actors, models and the like, generally have minimal marketing budgets, a PR Manager and maybe a handful of marketing staff. But they dominate the Top 100 social media accounts.

If they can dominate the social media space with comparatively minimal marketing support – what does it say about the skills required for the future marketer? After all, you can fail Year 10 at high school and easily be a social media manager – there are no skills/qualifications required to Tweet or post images to a social site.

Social media management continues to be the new industrial age job function – unskilled labour, doing mindless repetitive tasks at a machine – tweet, retweet, hashtag, upload, Like, tweet, retweet, hashtag, upload, Like, repeat infinitum…

I’m off to teach advertising strategy at university tonight – might have to revise the notes…