Disney exceeds 100 million fans on Facebook

Walt Disney would have been 109 this month, but the company is currently marking another milestone – exceeding 100 million fans on Facebook, making it the most popular company on the social networking site.

Significantly the dramatic rise in fans over the past 16 months followed the company’s decision to regularly update the content, as well as create more than 200 different fan pages. The overall number of fans are spread across the company’s pages which feature all of Disney’s films and characters – Disney’s main Facebook page has 15,060,404  fans followed by the Toy Story page with 11,416,127.

Statistics for the company’s social media activities are similarly impressive. Fans have commented more than 1.5 million times and ‘liked, shared or commented’ on Disney’s content more than six million times. Disney achieved 60 million Facebook ‘likes’ in its first year, and now attracts about five million new fans every month. 70% of the company’s fans are women.

Notably, in December 2009, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer joined the non-executive board of Walt Disney, regarded by many as an effort to improve Disney’s consumer internet and social networking offerings – especially as it is one of the few such companies with such an iconic and personal relationship with its customers.