The US rapper claims the crown after reaching almost 29m Facebook fans or ‘likes’, overtaking Lady Gaga in a closely contested and long drawn out battle. Less than 1m fans have separated the two stars for more than two months.
But in the end even Lady Gaga could not hold off Eminem, who has been recruiting 546,000 new fans each week – equivalent to a large city and more than the population of Luxembourg. Only one person retains more Facebook popularity than Eminem - the late Michael Jackson, currently at just over 29m fans, although at current rates of fan growth, even the King of Pop looks unlikely to retain his lead.
Lady Gaga herself reigned Facebook for eight months, having taken the crown from Barack Obama on June 25th 2010. Obama has since dropped to 12th place among stars on the network.
Eminem’s spectacular new milestone comes just three days after the Recovery star became the third person in history to achieve 1bn views on his official YouTube channel. Only Twitter has shown some resistance to Eminem’s astonishing digital reach. With just over 3m followers, Eminem is in 31st place and a long way behind Twitter Queen Lady Gaga on 8.4m followers.
Despite the new milestone, on an aggregated basis Famecount.com still ranks Eminem the third most popular star on social media, behind Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber - thanks to these stars’ greater reach on Twitter and YouTube. Groovecount.com, which also includes measures of fame across music digital services, places Eminem second after Lady Gaga.
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