Whether or not we care to admit it, today’s society places a huge emphasis on the importance and presence of social media. Social media sites are used by all age ranges for a wide variety of reasons. Over the past few years, social media sharing has become one of the most popular forms of communication between friends, family, professional acquaintances or even complete strangers. Any person with an internet connection and/or smartphone has the ability to instantly connect with millions of people whenever they feel like it.
Because of social media’s insane popularity, industries have had to take a different approach to marketing and branding. As a journalism major studying media trends in this day and age, I’ve been able to see this transformation first hand. What started off as print marketing campaigns and TV/radio advertisements have quickly changed into targeted ads designed specifically for social media consumption. This rise in digital marketing has affected everyone, not just big business. Celebrities of all sorts have had to adjust to the times as well.
While some people may make the argument that social media leads to oversharing and overexposure especially when it comes to big name celebrities, many believe these platforms offer a unique way to connect and interact with their favorite stars, brands and franchises. Even though it seems like Facebook has been upstaged by Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat as of late, Facebook still reaches a huge audience and serves as a main form of communication and preferred social media platform around the globe.
The dataset represented in my data visualization came from Statista, and it displays the most popular Facebook fan pages based on the number of user “fans” as of April 2018. Since Facebook is so relevant on a worldwide scale, the resulting information includes a variety of celebrities, companies and franchises. What I found to be most surprising in this data was that the three most popular pages were Facebook related: Facebook for Every Phone, Facebook Sales Germany, and Facebook. All three of these pages had the same number of fans - 208.14 million. Although I shouldn’t be surprised by this, I surely thought that some other page would wear the crown. Some of the other notable pages cited were Samsung Mobile USA, Christiano Ronaldo and Coca-Cola Zero. Samsung Mobile is a major global brand, Christiano Ronaldo is one of the most famous professional soccer players in the world, and Coca-Cola obviously has a massive consumer following as well. It’s interesting to note that of the twenty pages listed, only three were women entertainers compared to the eight men. While the dataset didn’t provide a gender breakdown of the “fans”, I’m definitely curious about the distribution.
Not surprisingly, musicians are the vast majority of pages on this list. Artists mentioned include Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift, Will Smith, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Eminem and Shakira. These stars are some of the most famous people in the world, so it’s fitting that they have the most “fans” on Facebook as well. I also want to point out that there are four soccer teams/players on the list. While I personally don’t know much about soccer, I do know that it’s one of the most popular sports in the world. I also know that teams are gearing up for the World Cup right now, which could certainly impact the exposure of Ronaldo and Lionel Messi as well as Real Madrid CF and FC Barcelona in the month of April.
Fan pages are a unique concept, as they don’t really offer much opportunity for direct engagement. While there are obviously different circumstances with each page, most are run by PR people, not the actual person, company, or franchise represented. Usually, the pages include relevant news, photos, and videos so that fans can have a place where they feel like they are consuming exclusive content. As social media evolves even further, and more and more celebrities come from places like viral social media accounts, I’ll be interested to see what types of pages are represented in the future.
When it came time to design a way to visualize this data, I knew I wanted to display the different fan pages in varying sizes and colors according to their popularity. Our class discussion of hierarchy is something I had in mind for this project from the very beginning. Graphic Design The New Basics defines hierarchy as “the order of importance within a social group… or in a body of text,” (129). In this case, I knew that the data would lend perfectly to a graphic that demonstrated the weight of each specific fan page.
I chose to convey the pages and their data through brightly colored circles that were then organized into an overall spiral design. Each circle’s size and unique color directly correlates to its numerical value, with the value increasing as you get further into the spiral. The three biggest values, Facebook, Facebook Sales Germany and Facebook for Every Phone are all the same shade of green since they have the same value, and they at the forefront of the design which demonstrates the importance of those three pages.
The spiral design is easy to visually digest and has an inherent sense of balance. I worked to create this balance by evenly distributing the representative colors of the circles and also by starting the spiral on the lower left-hand side. This allows the reader to process the graphic in a clock-wise motion which provides stability and comfort. I also chose to include a bit of negative space between circles so that the data points would stand out, and readers would be able to distinguish them from each other. I decided to keep the circles filled with plain color instead of pattern so that the design would not look too busy, especially since the graphic is already organized in a circular pattern. Finally, the colors I included were meant to be somewhat calming while still contrasting enough that they were visually appealing. I feel as though the low saturation of the colors contributes to the overall composition of the design and offers a nice aesthetic that accurately depicts the data set.
In conclusion, this design project showed me the multitude of ways in which one can visually represent complex data. I definitely think that varying graphics are much more stimulating than a simple bar graph while still representing the same information.