I didn’t actually realize that Kutcher had a Facebook Fan Page until late this morning, when Facebook informed me through their “Highlights” section that four of my friends had become fans of the actor, and invited me to become one as well.
At the time, Kutcher was around 980,000 fans – as I write this, he’s approaching 995,000. Meanwhile, on Twitter, Kutcher seems to be putting on a thousand new followers every hour or so – in total, he added around 23,000 yesterday, with his current count sitting around 955,000.
So what do these differing growth rates indicate? That in spite of all of the media hype for the Kutcher-CNN story, Facebook can be a more viral platform thanks to its aggregation of data about what’s going on within your social circle. Twitter doesn’t currently have any way of bringing together this type of data, though, plenty of third-party applications attempt to.