Deciding which celebrity-brand connections are the most powerful is no longer a matter of guess work. Using social media rankings you can keep you in touch with who is hot and who is not.
It is relatively well known that Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and Taylor swift generally hold the top three spots for Facebook followers – currently running at more than 70 million each. Those same three top the polls with Twitter followers.
However, this is a relatively stagnant measure of interest in a celebrity, as followers don’t often unfollow someone, even if they first liked them several years ago.
There are more accurate gauges of current popularity, given that topical events from day to day can change interest in a celebrity. One such measure is of fans added each day on Facebook. It is probably not be that surprising that at the time of writing (during the Rio Olympics) swimming star Michael Phelps is ranked number one, with more than 72,000 fans added in the past day.
Certainly, when assessing celebrity power for brand sales, connecting social media rankings with images can be a powerful tool when selling to PR companies and brand managers. In many cases, the celebrities with the highest recent rankings are not the usual suspects, opening more avenues to monetise brand images.
Looking into the future, the importance of current celebrity status may become so acute for image buyers that celebrity ranking will be part of the metadata added to images – with links through to sites giving current ranking.