317 top stars compete, whose Weibo followers are the most inflated? | DT Data

Rocket Girl Yang Yunqing also made the water content list with 5.51% active fans. DT also curiously checked her teammates Meng Meiqi and Wu Xuanyi, and their active fans were not too high, less than 7% - far from Yang Chaoyue's 18.93% .

They are all stars, so why is there such a big difference in active fans? We did some simple analysis.

2. Question 1: What determines the number of active fans?

 Let’s first look at the characteristics of the stars with the most active fans.

We simply ranked these stars by the number of active fans and conducted a survey to determine who is the most popular star on Weibo .

The results are not consistent with the daily perception of the presence of celebrities on Weibo. He Jiong, Deng Chao and Xie Na occupy the top 3 in the active fans ranking . The number of active fans is not proportional to the volume of voice, which shows that passers-by who quietly follow and watch the fun are the backbone.

Apart from He Jiong and Xie Na, most of the top rankings are actors. TV dramas and popular variety shows are indeed a great way to increase national popularity. If you don’t have the talent of a joke teller like Xue Zhiqian, the effective way to increase your fans should be to show your face in variety shows and TV dramas like Angelababy .

We also noticed that the stars in the top 20 have all been famous for quite some time. After all, to gather such a huge number of fans, they have to rely to a large extent on constantly attracting the favor of passers-by. The longer they make their presence felt, the more they accumulate.

This also applies to traffic stars. Among the top 20 active fans , there are several who can be called traffic stars: Yi Yang Qianxi, Li Yifeng, Lu Han, Zhang Yixing, and Wu Yifan, all of whom are familiar names in the early years of the " Four Big and Three Small " and " Four Returnees " .

Although the new traffic stars such as Li Xian, Xiao Zhan, Wang Yibo, and Zhu Yilong have a strong presence, their fan base is still relatively weak due to insufficient accumulation. The total number of fans of most of them is just over 20 million. If they want to compete for national popularity, they will probably have to continue to rely on passers-by. 

Here we can summarize the " First Theorem of Active Celebrity Fans " : If you want to have a sufficiently active Weibo, it still takes time to accumulate a large fan base.

3. Question 2: Will the total number of fans affect the proportion of active fans?

Next, we compared the number of Weibo fans and the percentage of active fans of 317 celebrities, and made two more discoveries .

First, as the number of celebrities’ Weibo fans increases, the difference in water content among celebrities of the same level narrows, and both the maximum and minimum values ​​gradually disappear.

We can understand this trend in this way: Weibo's overall active fans are limited. When the fan base reaches a giant level, the piece of cake that everyone can grab is also limited, and the active fan rate of celebrities gradually stabilizes - increasingly converging with Weibo's overall active fan rate.

Currently, there are four bloggers on Weibo with more than 100 million fans, namely Xie Na, He Jiong, Yang Mi and Yang Ying. Among them, He Jiong has the highest active fan rate ( 14.0% ), and Yang Ying has the lowest ( 11.3% ). The difference in the water content of their fans is not too big.

Another finding is that 40 million is a dividing point for the active fan rate. When the number of fans reaches this level, as the total number of fans increases, the proportion of active fans shows a downward trend.

Combining the above two points, we can summarize the " Second Theorem of Celebrity Active Fans " : the lower the total number of fans, the easier it is to have a high active fan rate.

This " easy " can be broken down like this:

When a star has 10 million fans, he or she is considered popular on Weibo. So between 10 million and 20 million, there are mainly two types of stars: those who are really popular and those who want to show off their popularity . There is naturally a huge difference in the amount of fans between those who are " really popular " and those who are " pretending to be popular " .

4. Doubt 3: The louder and more enthusiastic the fans are, the more  Will the more active fans there are?

In the topic discussion on Weibo, traffic stars are naturally an unavoidable topic. They have gained the biggest voice on Weibo, and their enthusiastic fans also make them have a strong presence.

So, will the enthusiasm of fans affect the water content of fans on celebrity Weibo?

We use the star's ranking on the super topic list to represent his / her fan enthusiasm. The figure below shows the active fan performance of the top 20 stars on the super topic list. The average active fan rate is 17% , which is higher than the average level of 317 stars ( 14.26% ).

But judging from the previous ranking of these stars whose fans are particularly enthusiastic, the enthusiasm of fans is not equivalent to the proportion of his / her active fans.

Looking at the specific list, Zhang Yunlei, who ranks 13th on the Super Topic List, has the third highest active fan rate , second only to this year's most popular Li Xian and Xiao Zhan. Cai Xukun, who ranks first on the list, has an active fan rate of only 11.86% , ranking 16th .

Combining the above analysis, we can summarize the " Third Theorem of Celebrity Active Fans " : the volume and enthusiasm of fans have little to do with the number of active fans of celebrities.

As mentioned earlier, passers-by are the living force of Weibo fans.

In order to further explore the topic, we divided the stars on the super topic list into four quadrants based on the number of active fans and the proportion of active fans: high number of fans and low active fan rate, high number of fans and high active fan rate, low number of fans and high active fan rate, and low number of fans and low active fan rate.

In the high-quality camp with a large number of fans and a high active fan rate, traffic stars are competing with powerful artists. In addition to everyone’s husbands Li Xian and Xiao Zhan, there is also everyone’s childhood idol Hu Ge.

The Buddhist camp with a high number of fans and a low active fan rate is mainly composed of old traffic stars who have debuted for many years, including TFBOYS , Tang Yan, Yang Mi, Zhao Liying and Huang Zitao. There are still many fans accompanying them, but most of them have entered a state of peace and tranquility.

In the potential camp with low fan base and high active fan rate, Guo Qilin and Zhang Yunlei from Deyun Club are on the list. R1SE members Yao Chen, Yan Xujia and Zhang Yanqi, who debuted through Tencent Video's "Creation Camp 2019 " in June this year, are also on the list.

On the other hand, other members of the group, Liu Ye, Zhai Xiaowen and Zhao Lei, are in the camp with low number of fans and low active fan rate. In addition, three members of the UNINE group , Li Zhenning, Hu Chunyang and captain Li Wenhan, who debuted through iQiyi variety shows in April this year, are all in this camp, adding another chapter to the " history of the demise of boy bands " in China .

5. Ending

John Wanamaker once put forward a point of view in the second half of the 19th century, which is known as the " Goldbach Conjecture " in the advertising and marketing industry : I know that half of the money spent on advertising is useless, but the problem is that I don't know which half.

After satisfying DT 's own curiosity, we also evaluated the effect of fan advertising on Weibo from the perspective of brands. We simply and roughly compared the number of active fans and sales power of celebrities (the data comes from CBNData Star Number), and finally found that there is not much correlation between them.

There are too many factors that influence celebrity endorsements, and the marketing process is not simply about placing advertisements.

For brands, there are too few top-tier influencers and limited budgets, and they want to make the money they spend count. But the reality is that placing ads on Weibo or communicating with consumers through KOLs is still a gamble.

The incident of internet celebrities bringing zero sales has undoubtedly sounded the alarm for the advertising industry: in today's marketing industry where the cost of faking traffic is low, internet celebrities gather in large numbers, and chaos is rampant, there is no guarantee that all the money invested by brands will be wasted.