This is some really interesting data. I am short on time to go into much depth right now but will follow up with more thoughts and commentary over the next 24 hours.

The report, commissioned by Famecount.com picked one particular day, Wednesday 2nd June 2010 and measured the ranking (size) of following major brands achieved. The result?

Starbucks was found to be the world’s most popular consumer brand with 7.4 million Facebook fans, 901,925 Twitter followers and 6,509 YouTube subscribers resulting in a Famecount index of 69.7 percent.  The world’s top media brand was found to be Texas Hold ‘Em, a game developed by Zynga which has the world’s most popular Facebook page with 19 million Facebook Fans, plus  135,234 Twitter followers and 1,017 YouTube subscribers.

Daniel Dearlove, founder of Famecount.com comments, “This data is unique in that it gives us for the first time an accurate global ranking of the popularity of brands online,” It is interesting to see established offline brands perform so strongly. This highlights the growing importance of social media in wider marketing campaigns, as well as the applicability of these channels to established brands, which may not have had a significant online presence previously. Social networks are helping them to tap into wider audiences and strengthen communications with existing consumers.

So, this is pretty interesting. I have a bunch of questions which I will pitch later, like – did they pick up on all the official brand channels (like multiple Twitter accounts) – how did they extract non official fan pages, groups etc. as part of the methodology? I know these won’t make a vast difference to the numbers but if such results are to be measured they need to be right.

You can see more of the results on the famecount blog.

You can have a look yourself at famecount.com