Famecount vs. Fan Page List

Last year we wrote about Famecount, a social media listening tool that ranks celebrities and brands by looking at their social media popularity.  Since then, a company called Fan Page List got in touch to tell us about their social media monitoring website.

They were keen to stress that their service uses different metrics for ranking, and also makes a distinction between “Brands” (corporations) and “Products” (products that are brands).

Founder, Quy Lee, says:

We don’t necessarily think their Famecount index is very useful since not all users have YouTube accounts… At Fan Page List, we simply give you Fans & Followers and let users make their own judgment by ranking on each metric.

So, we decided to pitch the two websites against each other, to see which site has the best social media monitoring skills.

Social Media Monitoring face-off

	Famecount	Fan Page List
Social media accounts covered	Facebook, Twitter and YouTube	Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare
Method of ranking	Patent pending secret method based on API. Weighting on networks where you need to work harder for followers to ensure balanced metric.	API-based, with distinction between products and brands. Use of Klout to rank Twitter, which uses 25 different scoring methods to rate users.
Categories	Facebook stars, Twitter stars, YouTube stars, Overall stars.Sections for actors, politicians, games, films and other categories. You can also check rankings by country.	Sectors including celebs, athletes, movies and TV shows.
Other facilities	Popularity by day, week and month.	Klout scoreSimple sharing function
Pro	Launching beta version soon	None mentioned

So which one’s better?

Well, both have their moments. The inclusion of is a nice touch on Famecount — though Fan Page List insists it’s not relevant since not every brand uses it. Meanwhile, Fan Page List looks a lot more cluttered — though neither has a particularly moving aesthetic.

And when it comes to searching by category, location and network, UK site Famecount wins hands down. Since all the largest social media stars are in the US, they tend to over-shadow proceedings, which can be strange for UK users who may not even be aware of some of the biggest stars.

Can you measure social media listening?

Perhaps the bigger questions is how much store should we set by popularity rankings? As Barry Silverstein from Reve News points out:

Over my years in marketing, I’ve learned to take numbers with a grain of salt, so I don’t necessarily agree with the notion of a popularity index, which might skew the data and show a somewhat arbitrary ranking… But let’s put that aside and consider the implications of the raw numbers… For [Starbucks] to generate interest from almost eight million people is, from a marketing perspective, nirvana.

Barry Silverstein, Do Famecount’s numbers tell the whole story?

Whether we can really give people a number based on their followers and popularity online is moot.

Daniel Dearlove from Famecount says:

I agree that it is a challenge to measure “popularity” and numbers will never tell the whole story. Although I hope our figures add something interesting to the debate, on what we agree is a very important marketing channel.