Today was the day that Lionel Messi launched his official Facebook page. Numerous sites around the world (incl. Mashable) have been busy publishing stories around how Messi has been able to gather almost 7 million friends in just one day!

Although Messi is the best football player on the planet at the moment and his club just took a big step towards the Champions League semi-final, it seems like things have been blown out of proportion in regards to the almost 7 million fans.

Let us take a closer look at the numbers. It is now approximately 12 hours ago since the launch occured. Messi at the moment has 6.77 million “likes”, which would mean that 9,400 people would have clicked on “like” each and every minute the last 12 hours! To make the story even better, Messi already had 6.66 million likes at 2PM (Central European Time) today, which would mean that 22,200 people each and every minute would have become fan in the first hours after the launch (assuming the page was launched at 9AM).

Getting back to reality; the starting number for the Lionel Messi page was already well above the 6 million when it was launched this morning (through people signing up on an unofficial page in the past months). A more realistic growth number on this first day of the official Messi page is 200,000-300,000 which is certainly still an impressive number – although not as interesting a story as one with 6 or 7 million in it!

What has been done very well around the whole launch, however, is the hype that has been created. This has lead to thousands of tweets and articles about the 6-7 million fans in one day. The launch has thus not only reached Messi fans but also sparked additional interest due to its sheer volume. This way the news – and Messi – has made it into regions, onto sites and its way to readers who may not even be big Messi fans in the first place.

What do you think? Great marketing stunt, social media experts uncritically writing news stories or?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.