I’m happy to get a few new likes a day on my Facebook profile, but not Lionel “Leo” Messi. He joined Facebook just a few short hours ago and now has over 6 and a half million fans and he’s not done yet. Just in the process of writing this article he’s already jumped up another 10 thousand.
Messi’s Facebook page was flooded with fans after he joined the site this morning, getting over 12,000 likes on his first wall post alone. It’s unclear at this point why Messi fans are flocking to his page in such numbers but at this point he actually has more fans than his sponsor Adidas who only has 1.8 million fans! Currently his page has over 6.6 million Likes in the just over 3 hours that his page has been active.
Messi became the youngest Argentine to play in the World Cup back in 2006 and has set scoring goals for current team FC Barcelona in every season since. In the 2009-2010 season he equaled Ronaldo’s scoring record of 47 goals in all competitions. Messi is an incredibly accomplished player at 23 and some believe that he may become one of the best players ever if he stays on course. His popularity with the Argentine fans is near universal and may have something to do with the quick response to his new Facebook page. It also doesn’t hurt that his club, FC Barcelona, posted up the news about his fan page on their wall. They currently have over 12 million followers of their own so I don’t think that Messi’s follower count is done growing yet.
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We’re not sure if this is a record number of followers for a fan page in such a short time, but if it’s not, it should be. Rapper Lil-Wayne set a record for likes on a single post in one day back in February and currently has over 20 million followers but the speed of response by Messi’s fans seems set to eclipse that in short order.
We’ve contacted Facebook to see if Messi’s crop of followers was landed in record time and we’ll update you when they get back to us.
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