We've previously used social listening to look at the social and online mentions of the top members of the Forbes Billionaire list and the Forbes Most Powerful Women list to see which of the world's richest and most influential people are the hottest topics of discussion for the online public.
With the 2015 Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans having been announced on September 29th, we decided to use Talkwalker social media analytics to see whether the richest of the rich were also the most discussed on social media.
Looking at numbers over the last 30 days, there was a big gap between the levels of discussion surrounding the 10 richest Americans, with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on top, ahead of Microsoft's Bill Gates in second.
The rest are some way behind showing the impact that these two giants of tech have on the online world. And although the data here only looks at the last month, it is no coincidence that Gates and Zuckerberg were also top of the list of most discussed billionaires earlier this year. Mentions for top performer Zuckerberg peaked on September 16th, when he invited wrongly accused Ahmed Mohamed to visit Facebook's offices.
In fact, of the ten wealthiest Americans, the top 4 most discussed all had strong tech connections with only Warren Buffet in the top 5. Around 83% of online mentions of the 10 came from Twitter, 8.2% from news websites and just over 4% from blogs.
For more on how business leaders around the world can use social to their advantage, take a look at our blogs on FTSE 100 CEO's on Twitter and how executives can use social to their company's benefit.
