Why are porn stars so good at social media?

On social media porn stars aren’t popular just because of boobs, as you would assume (though it definitely helps). Instead, they got so successful in managing their profiles by accomplishing what so many brands and businesses fail to do. As The Daily Dot suggests, porn actresses and actors build a strong personal brand where they connect and communicate with their fans. “Be yourself” as the expression commands, and they are, by showing their real side as opposed to their usual sex-fuelled personnas. And lastly, they stay far away from commercial gain by promoting themselves as opposed to their products. It’s what social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are perfect for. But rarely do brands do it as well as porn stars do.

Naked truth about porn on social media – infographic by Sotrender & Pornhub

Why did we decide to only focus on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? Well, porn stars don’t like YouTube, apparently. Only several of the actresses and actors included in the analysis run their own YouTube channels. The vast majority of the channels we found were not official and contained only short fragments of porn films. However, they’re short enough as not to breach the standards of the YouTube community.

As the Daily Beast and Gawker suggest, it seems that porn stars don’t really like Facebook either. Although most porn stars don’t post any pornographic material, Facebook still bans their accounts. They seem to not want to take any chances with complaints about porn stars so they take their accounts down without giving it a second thought. It’s far from ideal for porn actresses and actors, but obviously they can’t stop using it because Facebook is still the most popular social media site around.

In our analysis we only included porn stars that are still active, have performed in at least one movie in 2015 and run Facebook pages. Yes, we know that Sasha Grey is the best. Undoubtedly, she is the queen of all porn stars active across social media. But the style of her posts significantly differs from the style of other actresses’, and hers no longer concern her acting career. Apart from Grey, the top of the rankings would also include Jenna Jameson, Bree Olson or Zuzka Light, if only they had performed in a movie in the past 8 months. What is also interesting is the fact that porn actresses are far more popular on social media than actors. Even though we had included their profiles in our analysis, they didn’t show up in any of the top rankings.

The most popular porn porn stars on social media

Who wins on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? Have a look at the chart prepared according to Sotrender’s data presenting the top 10 most popular porn star pages on Facebook based on the number of fans, with Alexis Texas topping the ranking. The top profiles typically posted the most pictures, usually with revealing clothing.

Naked truth about porn on social media – the most popular porn stars on Facebook

The leader on Twitter is different than on Facebook. Below we show the top 10 most popular pornstar Twitter profiles based on the number of followers, with Lisa Ann topping the ranking. Contrary to other social media sites, porn stars on Twitter post tweets relating to their daily life, often with some humor and they quite often engage themselves in conversations with their fans.

Naked truth about porn on social media – the most popular porn stars on Twitter

And in the top 10 most popular porn star Instagram accounts based on the number of followers, Gianna Nicole tops the ranking.

Naked truth about porn on social media – the most popular pornstars on Instagram

And who is the most popular pornstar on Pornhub? We checked the popularity of films staring various porn stars so far this year. This is what we discovered:

Naked truth about porn on social media – the most popular porn stars on Pornhub this year

Types of posts from porn on social media

The style of communication differs depending on the channel. It seems that porn stars treat Facebook mainly as a source of likes for their photos, as they collect the most activities. And frankly, it’s no surprise that photos are the most popular type of post for actors and actresses. As a result, we can expect that as visual materials become more and more popular, the role of Facebook will decrease while Instagram’s role will increase (and Instagram is already one of the main social media channels both for celebrities and brands). Porn stars’ Twitter profiles on the other hand are full of humor, controversial thoughts, short conversations with fans (which are very common) and grant links to events on which it will be possible to meet the stars in person.

Unsurprisingly, the most popular type of posts on Facebook are photos, and they are posted almost 3 times more than the second most popular type – links. As we can see, porn stars hardly use statuses that contain plain text only and very rarely post videos, which is very surprising. Maybe they don’t know that Facebook loves videos? 🙂

Content is the queen

What are the best Facebook posts about? You guessed it. They contain pictures or videos showing various porn stars showcasinging their bodies. What are the best tweets about? Now here comes a surprise. Compared to other social media channels, Twitter is the most polite and lacking in nudity. The best tweets contain pictures of non-nude porn stars and that depict funny life events, thoughts or axioms. You will see the examples on the infographic below.

How is this so? Well, Twitter porn star audiences aren’t as impressed by a pretty body as they are with humor or real life. Of all the social media channels, Twitter is the one that most promotes and facilitates being social and conversational. So, it actually isn’t all that surprising that people are more interested in seeing their favourite porn star’s “real” side here. More pornography would just be more professional work and their audience can get that from loads of other places on the internet.

The most popular types of tweet are relatively close together, with links being used moderately more than plain text tweets and tweets with media attached. Media (pics and videos) is used the least, showing that porn stars are using Twitter for more than just sexy pictures.

Porn on social media – language choices of porn stars and their fans

As the wordclouds on the infographic show, lots of love is shared between porn stars and their fans. Porn stars very often use the word “love” as a greeting to their fans, while the fans seem to ascribe a bit more value to it. The majority of post topics revolve around love, beauty, the human body and of course, sex.

Naked truth about porn on social media – words used by porn stars the most often

Fans tend to be a bit dirtier than porn stars with their comments. After analyzing over 10k posts, Sotrender discovered that fans prefer to write about sex rather than love. Facebook is full of posts containing love declarations with compliments like “You’re hot, ” “Sexy butt, ” or the very eloquent “Nice ass”. Porn stars are always “cute” and “sweet, ” but their tenderness doesn’t stop fans from asking them for anal sex. It’s also popular to see posts directed to former porn stars in which fans beg them to come back to the porn industry and stop wasting time on “stupid things.” In some cases, those stupid things included, for example, the defense of animal rights… which of course is more than far from being stupid.

Naked truth about porn on social media – Sasha Grey’s post

Some porn stars have very loyal and devoted fans who regularly perform actions such as liking, commenting or sharing their posts. We constantly see comments mentioning “Love” and compliments like “Beautiful” and more of “You’re hot”. On the chart you will only find actresses who performed in a film within the last 6 months, so remember that previously famous stars such as Zuzka Light (widely known as Susana Spears) or Jenna Jameson also attract a big number of very loyal fans.

What’s love got to do with it? – The relationship status of porn fans

What is the average relationship status of Facebook users interested in sex and porn on social media? Unsurprisingly, single people hold the highest percentage. Those in more committed types of relationships are less interested in porn, but married individuals are still more interested than engaged ones. It may seem funny, but interest in sex and pornography is not particularly different in real life than where Facebook users are concerned, but with one difference.

People interested in porn stars’ pages, when compared to all Facebook users are, less frequently, married. But on the other hand, they are significantly more often engaged to someone. Fairly often they also declare that they’re in a relationship. The structure of this group has a strong cultural background. Have a look at a more conservative country like Poland, for example, among the fans of sex and porn sites, only 7% were engaged, 11% were married, and 52% were single.

Naked truth about porn on social media – relationship status of people interested in porn

Naked truth about porn on social media – political POV’s

What are the political opinions of people interested in pornography? We analyzed the views of Britons as a follow up after the report on the Britain General Election we had prepared in April. It turns out that about 10% of people engaged in porn actress and actor profiles also engaged themselves in political Facebook pages. Of this group, the vast majority were engaged on pages devoted to right and extreme right parties (Britain First, British National Party and UKiP). It seemed a bit fishy to us, as we thought that it was likely that extreme right profiles simply attract a bigger number of engaged users. That’s when we decided to deepen our analysis using the affinity index. We compared all users engaged in political party pages with users engaged both in political party pages and porn star pages. How did it turn out? It’s time to bust out the numbers.

Let’s assume that 12% of all users interested in politics are engaged on the page of UKiP.  16% of users engaged both on the pages of political parties and pages devoted to porn were engaged on the page of the party. In this case, the affinity index amounted to 16/12. Which in other terms, is 1.3 (all results higher than 1 mean that there is a large correlation between the two groups).

Naked truth about porn on social media – political views of people interested in porn

It seems that people who relate to the far right politically are engaging in porn pages much more heavily than those in the centre or left of centre. They’re more apt to voice their opinions on whatever subject the stars posted about. After looking at the affinity index, we can see that generally, people with extreme political views comment more on porn pages. It’s not just limited to right-wing extremism. So what’s the conclusion? Simple. If you visit pages devoted to porn and you’re interested in politics it’s highly probable that you have extreme opinions and more often lean to the right rather than left.

See the whole infographic by Sotrender & Pornhub

Naked truth about porn on social media – infographic by Sotrender & Pornhub

We analyzed over 85k posts and tweets published on over 600 profiles of porn actors and actresses on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram between 2015-01-30 and 2015-07-30. For the analysis, we chose profiles of porn stars who were still active and performing and hadn’t announced that they were going to focus on another activity other than porn.

Sotrender is a social media analytics company providing both agencies and small and medium businesses with intuitive solutions, enabling them to analyze and optimize their performance on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube based on automatic, data-driven tips, as well as prepare fast and comprehensive PDF reports on the results of their activities.