Pop star Shakira is the face that Facebook really likes

THE Facebook page of Colombian star Shakira illustrates the extent of her popularity.

FEE APPLIES...MUST CREDIT: Alamy...ONE TIME USE... Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 13th July, 2014. Singer Shakira takes part in the closing ceremony of the 2014 FIFA World Cup at Maracana Stadium in Rio-de-Janeiro. Photo Valery Sharifulin/ITAR-TASS/Alamy Live News Photo: Alamy Fee applies, single use, must credit Picture: Alamy

ON New Year’s Eve of 2008, Shakira’s Facebook account posted a blurry, amateurish photo of the pop star with the one-word caption “Rehearsing”. In the foreground was the large figure of a man whose head is cut off by the top of the photo. According to Facebook metrics, in the week after it was posted, it drew two comments.

If you fast-forward by scrolling the timeline of Shakira’s page all the way up to a few weeks ago, you see a sharp photo of the smiling singer on the field at the soccer World Cup. The photo has been liked more than 3.8 million times and is among the 10 most popular photos on Facebook.

In the five years between those two photos, Shakira’s Facebook page has grown from 318,000 “likes” to 100 million — becoming the first page to do so. That’s 8 per cent of Facebook’s universe of 1.28 billion monthly active users around the world.

Only Facebook’s own brand page and mobile-app page have more people who have liked them. Shakira’s page is known as a brand page to differentiate it from personal pages. Brand pages’ popularity is measured by “likes”, the number of people who have chosen to follow posts by the pages.

As such, it represents a microcosm of the Facebook experience for brands, both good and bad. It allows a huge international star to personally connect with an enormous community of engaged fans, at a level never seen. But it also hosts comments littered with porn and spam, and it attracts perhaps millions of fake user profiles.

The marketing benefits are extensive: her page links to iTunes, where fans can buy her music and videos, to her own website where they can buy merchandise, and to other sites where they can buy items such as her perfume. She can post her videos and promote television appearances.

Asked via email about reaching the 100-million fan milestone, Shakira calls it “just an unfathomable number”. Having the most popular page on all of Facebook is “something I never necessarily anticipated but a really welcoming and heartwarming surprise”. Yet her accomplishment didn’t sneak up on her: she had been posting certain benchmarks to her fans, such as breaking 50 million and becoming the biggest celebrity page on Facebook in March, when she passed fellow pop star Rihanna. She also got a huge boost from the World Cup, with which the singer has a long association, and where she performed at the closing ceremony. The cup generated three billion Facebook interactions (posts, comments, likes and shares) from 350 million people.

It is her international appeal, embodied by the soccer tournament, that has propelled her social media success, says Jan Rezab, chief executive of the social media metrics company Socialbakers. Just 11 per cent of Shakira’s fan base is in the US, compared with 17 per cent for Rihanna and 25 per cent for Eminem, according to Social­bakers. “That’s unusual, definitely,” says Rezab, whose team tracks social media data for brands. Shakira’s social media team posts in English, Spanish, German, French, Russian and other languages. The singer, born Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll in Colombia to a father of Lebanese descent, is a global brand, with notable strength in Spanish-speaking countries and the Middle East. She is also a personable one. The singer writes many of her own posts and takes some of her own photos — including pictures of her son Milan, whose bath-time photo from August 2013 drew 1.7 million likes, and more than 25,000 “shares”, eliciting the “awww” that baby photos on Facebook always do.

Shakira signs many of her posts “Shak”, signifying that she supplied the text, rather than her staff. She has two assistants and a supervisor working with her on her Facebook account.

“I can interact meaningfully with (fans) on a regular basis,” she says, “and the response is immediate.” Socialbakers’ data shows Shakira’s page has four times more engagement — fans interacting with the page’s content — than Eminem’s.

Inevitably, there are problems in Facebook’s largest community. Chief among them are spam links in the comments left on Shakira’s posts. The cute photo of Shakira’s son at bath time is marred by numerous comments promoting a spam link purporting to show the baby’s mother in a “hooooot sexy bikini”. The comments beneath her posts are littered with spam. Taking them all down, her team says, would be an impossible job.

“It would be pretty much a full-on 24/7 job to delete everything, and you’d still be fighting a losing battle,” says Chris Salmon, a social media editor on the singer’s digital marketing team. “It’s something we try to keep an eye on and manage as much as we can.”

There is also the issue of fake fans. Facebook estimates between 5.5 per cent and 10 per cent of its monthly active users are either duplicates, “undesirable” (spammers) or “user misclassified” (someone’s cat with a Facebook page), according to filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. That works out to between 70 million and 130 million accounts that aren’t the main accounts of real people.

Internet security researcher Andrea Stroppa, who has researched celebrity social media accounts, estimates that Shakira’s page represents the same level of fakes as Facebook as a whole, with from five million to 10 million fakes. Spammers create these fake Facebook accounts and then they charge to have those profiles like brand pages or engage with their content. This can cause sudden, implausible growth leaps for certain brand pages.

Some celebrity pages in this murky world have paid for this to boost their popularity, either directly or through third-party agencies. Stroppa says he has seen underground sellers charge as little as $US1 for 1000 likes to a brand page. Shakira’s team says it has never paid to acquire fans, which is forbidden by Facebook’s terms of service.

Accounts with a strong overseas following often have high levels of fake followers, Stroppa adds. This makes Shaikira’s page especially vulnerable. Facebook periodically purges some of these fake accounts. In 2012, Facebook deleted nearly 35,000 fans in one day from Shakira’s account and more than 30,000 from the accounts of fellow pop stars Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, Social­bakers reported.

Rezab of Socialbakers called fake accounts on brand pages “unfortunately a natural part of the ecosystem”.

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