Social Media Power Index: Capital Cities

GlobalPost

No matter how troubled a city is, there is someone out there who is proud of it.

People, in fact, often tend to be more intensely proud of a city the more troubled it is (Michael Moore and Flint comes to mind). But when measuring the popularity of a city, the "hip" ones always win out. For not only do those that were born in those cities, say New York or Paris, have pride in them but so do those that have moved there or have spent a weekend there and had the "time of their lives" or whatever.

But what about your country's capital? How many Americans have "liked" Washington, DC on their Facebook pages? Answer: Not nearly as many as have "liked" Lima, Peru or Amman, Jordan or about 20 other capital cities.

What's the deal? Why so lame DC? Islamabad, ranked No. 10 worldwide, is practically homecoming queen compared to you.

Social media gives us an easy way to quantify a city's popularity (or a leader's popularity, or a corporation's, and so on).

So we have been looking at the most popular social networking sites around the globe, including Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, Bebo, Badoo and several others to see what we can glean. Since Facebook was the only site that had city pages, this installment of the Social Media Power Index only includes Facebook.

For out first installment, which charted social media power of the world's leaders, we added up the friends, likes and followers from Twitter and Facebook and other social media sites around the world to determine which world leaders wielded the most clout.

(More from the Social Media Power Index: World Leaders)

Stay tuned for more from the Social Media Power Index. After all, social media might just be the new benchmark on which all global power is measured.

Or, maybe not.

(All of GlobalPost's Social Media Power Index maps are made possible by our friends at chartsbin.com.)

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