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Cross post from the media measurement team at the ImpactWatch Blog

Hypothesis:

IF bacon is great THEN it will rule social media.

Experiment:

Bacon in the Social Media News

1. Bacon explosion – a heart-warming (burning?) recipe involving 2 pounds of bacon wrapped around 2 pounds of sausage. Needless to say, this innovation warranted a write up in the New York Times and won the creators quite a traffic spike – over 16k inbound links and more than 1.5 million blog visitors.

2. Bacon Salt – A weapon in the “never-ending quest to make everything taste like bacon.” Bacon Salt has profiles on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the founders were interviewed on Oprah.

3. Bacon AK-47 – The gents at ThisIsFreakingRidiculous.com made a full scale AK-47 assault rifle…out of bacon. It’s freaking ridiculous. Other bacon effigies include the Bacon Man, Bacon Suitcase and Bacon Bra (nice try, google it yourself).

Bacon Blogs

There are nearly 3 million search results for Bacon in Google Blogs, 57k with Bacon in the title of the blog (both excluding results containing the word Kevin).

Some awesome blogs I discovered while “working” on this post:

- Bacon UnWrapped – A four-year-old site founded because 1) everyone loves bacon and 2) there aren’t nearly enough websites dedicated to the topic of bacon. Founder Heather Lauer has also created a bacon community and is releasing a book about bacon in a few days. today!

- Mr. BaconPants – Obviously the bacon blog with the best title, this repository of bacon news and reviews includes a weekly video podcast on bacon and bacon-related items.

- Bacon Today – Daily news about “sweet, sweet bacon.” The site’s uses its exclusive Smaste TM rating system for smell+taste-testing bacon-related products – a rating system that’s “as arbitrary as it is inaccurate.”

- The Bacon Show – A delicious new bacon recipe posted every day.

- Bacon Haikus – Lyrical links to bacon (news) bits.

- Royal Bacon Society – The Ultimate Resource for all things bacon – including a bacon store and bacon downloads.

Bacon on Social Media Sites

Twitter -

TweetVolume says there have been 1.69 million tweets containing the word bacon in the history of Twitter.

BaconTwits tracks the word bacon on Twitter while @BaconFeed aggregates the #bacon hashtag (2,950 updates so far).

Apparently 48,367 people have added themselves to the WeFollow directory under the tag “bacon” . Truly mind-boggling.

Facebook – The top 5 bacon fan pages have a fanbase of more than 650k. There are over 3,000 members in just the top 20 bacon groups.

MySpace – Bacon doesn’t have as impressive of a presence on MySpace. Or maybe it does. I was distracted by all the glitter.

Flickr – 146,763 photos have titles or descriptions that mention Bacon -Kevin, 49,511 photos are tagged with Bacon -Kevin.

YouTube – 28,600 videos refer to Bacon -Kevin.

Delicious/Digg – Bacon is gaining steam on Digg, where story volume has been steadily climbing since 2006. There are 3,662 bacon stories on Digg – 34 of which have received over 1k diggs. 16,904 bookmarks on Delicious are tagged for bacon.

Other Bacon bits:

- Pocket Bacon – Pretend to cook bacon whenever the mood strikes with this handy iPhone app.

- The Baconcyclopedia – The Ultimate Bacon Reference of Baconic Proportions

- Bacolicio.us – Add bacon to any website. Seriously. Do it.

Don’t think for a minute that Bacon has come to rule social media without a fight. Some PR challenges for Bacon:

- Swine Flu – The much-ignored CDC says that pork is safe, but that didn’t stop bunches* of concerned netizens from broadcasting their fear of bacon and its breathren

- Trichinosis – Bacon won’t give you #hamthrax, but being infested with worms is also pretty gross.

- Heart Disease – Bacon is fatty.

- PETA – Bacon is made of previously living animals.

- The pro-veg lobby – Bacon is meat.

Conclusion:

While this study is not *perfectly* scientific, I’m pretty sure that excluding all Kevins cancelled out any illegitimate Bacon mentions. And, as you can see, Bacon is kicking Sausage’s ass on Twitter. So, I’m declaring victory for bacon in social media.

*A bunch is an official social media measurement term indicating “a lot”.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Bacon vs Sausage chart via Twist.
Bacon slice photo by SuperFantastic