Lady Gaga vs Rihanna. Who Rocks the Most at Social Media?

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Guest Post by: Alex Truby

They’re arguably the two biggest stars on the planet and both Lady Gaga and Rihanna have famously made incredibly innovative use of social media to get real commercial advantage. But which is using social media with the greatest effect, and which is most successful at actually engaging her fans?

On Facebook, these pop queens have both built massive audiences (Rihanna and Lady Gaga have the 5th and 6th biggest pages respectively – only Facebook itself, Texas Hold’em Poker, Eminem, and Youtube have more fans, in case you were interested) with both hurtling towards a cool 50 million fans each.

Long hailed as the queen of social media, Lady Gaga was the first living music artist to reach 10,000,000 Facebook fans, but last year Rihanna famously  leap-frogged Lady Gaga to become the most popular woman on Facebook.

However, huge numbers of Facebook fans are one thing, but what we’re really interested is who’s audience is the most engaged? If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know this is how we really rate the success of a Facebook page. To find the answer, we turned to social analytics tool Social Bakers to find who really is on the edge of glory (Sorry – ed)

And the winner is…

Yep. You probably guessed it – it’s Lady Gaga. Ri-Ri might have the largest and fastest growing audience (her fan numbers are currently growing at a rate of 2% a month compare to Lady Gaga’s 1%) but it’s Lady Gaga who truly keeps her ‘Little Monsters’ coming back for more.Over the last month, Lady Gaga’s fans have interacted on her page nearly a million times more than Rihanna’s fans giving her an engagement rate over twice that of her rival.

Now, we know that Lady Gaga gave away a music single to her fans as part of iTunes’ 12 Days of Christmas which definitely gave her a spike in social media buzz, but as you can see from the graph below  even without that, her engagement level is consistently around twice that of Rihanna.

Here are a few of our tips on how we think Rihanna should fight back:

Cut the number of links posted to the wall

In our experience, images and Status Updates work much better in the Facebook newsfeed than posted links which are what Rihanna’s team seem to favour. Of 41 posts in the month, Gaga posted 31 status updates and 8 photos, while Rihanna (whose team also posted 41 times) went for 23 links. And eight photos. We find across all our communities that posted links – as a rule – just don’t get the engagement rates that other post types do.

Let your fans post to your wall

Except in exceptional circumstances we would always recommend our clients let fans post to their Facebook wall. It’s much more inclusive and welcoming and gives people a nice warm fuzzy feeling. Lady Gaga lets fan do it. Rihanna should do.

Be more concise

People have short attention spans and overly long status updates don’t do anybody any favours. Keep it short and sweet. Rihanna’s roughly seem to be about as twice as long as Gaga’s do – Oh na na, it’s a no-no.

Original Post: http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2012/01/lady-gaga-vs-rihanna-who-rocks-the-most-at-social-media/