By Renard Teipelke
In the article “Facebook Rankings Reflect National Stereotypes” on SPIEGEL Online International, Alison Kilian writes about the findings of Socialbakers – a statistics portal that counted the ten most popular Facebook pages for each country. It may come with no surprise that Facebook users’ *likes* pretty often resemble the corresponding country stereotypes: US Americans *like* fast food and the Irish root for alcoholic brands, while Germans and the Spanish praise FC Bayern Munich and FC Barcelona as their #1 brand, respectively.
Alison Kilian talks about the relation between these Facebook top-ranking pages, country brands, and stereotypes. One important point here is that a *like* is a highly relevant factor for a page’s success, but definitely not the only one. It is also about fan posts and comments on a page’s wall, shared links, and other interactive relations between a particular page and its fans.
It is nothing new that a brand has to be ‘liked’ by its fans but also to be ‘consumed’ (in whatever form) by consumers. Linked to place branding, this hints to actual city pages on Facebook: Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users like Los Angeles, Paris, Bogotá, or Kuala Lumpur. These cities as brands seem to attract a lot of people in the virtual world. This is already a good start, but there is a real world necessity to it: in the end, the actual physical appearance of ‘guests’ in a particular city will contribute to the city’s success in terms of tourism, global connection, international economics, cultural exchange etc.
Read the whole article by Alison Kilian here.
Places. 