With well over 200 million registered users, Facebook is undeniably a giant on the web, and one that is sitting on an enormous amount of raw data about individuals and demographically selected groups at that. While private profiles are not even always as private as we’d like to assume – something we’ve learned yesterday and multiple times in the past as well – there’s a lot of data that you can extract from what’s openly available to the public.
For example: what are the most common names used on the social network?
Well that’s exactly what social search solutions provider Rapleaf wanted to find out, so they crawled no less than 100 million public Facebook profiles for unique names and compiled three lists: most common first names, last names and combinations of both.
There are little surprises to be found in the lists. Over 1 million of scanned profiles has ‘John’ as first name, making it the most popular on Facebook, although chances are ‘Michael’ should come out on top if ‘Mike’ as a nickname wouldn’t be counted as unique. Out of the ten most common first names, only number 10 is female (Maria), although ‘Chris’ could account for men or women alike. The top 10:
First Name Count
1. John 1,037,972
2. David 966,439
3. Michael 798,212
4. Chris 647,966
5. Mike 535,065
6. Mark 526,198
7. Paul 511,504
8. Daniel 504,203
9. James 494,945
10. Maria 484,693
The last names list is more representative of Facebook’s global reach than the list above, and is led by another American household name: Smith. Surnames like ‘Lee’ are popular worldwide, and the numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10 are all outspoken Hispanic names that are very common throughout the whole of Latin-America and Spain. Top ten:
Last Name Count
1. Smith 1,049,158
2. Jones 520,943
3. Johnson 440,978
4. Lee 392,709
5. Brown 375,444
6. Williams 372,486
7. Rodriguez 328,984
8. Garcia 311,477
9. Gonzalez 277,987
10. Lopez 269,896
The list of top 10 full names commonly used on Facebook is believed to be comprised of both real and fake accounts, considering the fact both ‘John Smith’ and ‘Jane Smith’ made it on there. Again, little surprises in the top 10:
Full Name Count
1. John Smith 75,980
2. Joe Smith 14,648
3. Bob Smith 13,846
4. Mike Smith 11,199
5. Juan Carlos 10,254
6. Jane Smith 10,023
7. Mike Jones 10,014
8. David Smith 9,322
9. Sarah Smith 8,534
10. James Smith 8,397
Rapleaf offers the top 100 lists as CSV download, but we’ve made it easier for you to consult them by creating separate pages with the full lists:
Top 100 Most Common First Names On Facebook
Top 100 Most Common Last Names On Facebook
Top 100 Most Common Full Names On Facebook
“John Smith” : what a surprise!
If Facebook was French, it would be “Jean Martin”.
I use “John” for my fake names too.
Some flies from ‘White House’ have entered my tiny little ‘Pink House’. They are troubling me. I requested them to go, but they are not leaving me alone. Initially I thought they are colorblind, they don’t get the difference between white and pink. (Surprised face)
But, they are threatening me that they would enter the ears of Google and MSFT and tell my new startup ideas. (Crying face) I won’t be able to stand up then, my ideas would just remain ideas. Can someone from white house call these flies back? I don’t want to hit them, they are from white house, you see.
Bye Bye!
And if it were Brazilian, it would be João da Silva
Nop, never
Imagine trying to look for your old buddy John Smith. Wonder how many John H. Smiths there are?
http://www.yout...h?v=Awla9mvPjxw
This was enlightening to know and yet, quite disappointing. However we are looking at the most common/generic names out there.
I’ll be sure to try to squeeze it in during a dinner conversation in the future.
So how about a list with the most UNcommon names?
that would be interesting
That was interesting info. I would have thought “Jackie” would have been one of the common female name on FB.
i wonder how it will be in 5years time where fb goes viral in china, middle east etc.
What about the LEAST common names?
Momar
Svavar
“Juan Carlos” is a first name, not a first+last name… fail.
Wow, interesting…
Juan Carlos is in most cases not a full name, but a first name and a second name that are combined quite often in Spanish speaking countries.
There’s an error on the Full Name Count: “Juan Carlos” is not a full name, but a composite name (a combination of first + middle name). Carlos is not a last name.
You know, as I wrote in my previous article on http://www.rev2.org, the facebook name thing was a real joke. Would rather see you expose who took the best names in each category
Jesus, Christians have no ingenuity.
Wow – I wonder what the most common last name in the USA is.
http://names.mo...on_surnames.htm
Very interesting article. So, really Jon Smith?
What do you mean by Latin America? French Canada, Hispanic America and Brazil too? You know that all countries that speaks a latin language can be Latin America, right?
Unfortunately you can only crawl public profiles, i tried to crawl some of my networks once to make some funny statistics but they didn’t like it
wth is up with all the smith
my name is not even in the list. kiddin
What about names that can be spelled different ways are they all grouped together or are they separate.
Are they going by the way names are pronounced or the way they are spelled.
Such as
John, Jon
Brittany, Britney, Brittney
Kevin, Kevan, Kevyn
Please clarify what is considered Latin America
Every place in the Americas beside the US, Bermuda, Belize, Bahamas, Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Falkland Islands, Guyana, Canada (excluding Quebec) and Suriname are Latin places.
The rest of the places either speak French, Spanish, Portuguese which are all Latin languages.
Wow, only one female first name in the top 10?
This is a really great top ten list, I have a friend named John Smith and had no idea it was #1 by far. Also have a friend named Chris Smith and thought that might be on the list too. Anyone can post their own list to our site http://www.toptentopten.com/. The coolest feature is you can let other people vote on the rankings of your list.