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How Social is Your Name?

The Most Popular Names in Social Networks

What’s the most “social” name in the networks? It may not be what you think it is because of many factors, the first being that many popular social networks operate using Roman (Latin) character sets. So, a surname like Chang may weigh low on the list because it has many Roman equivalents: Chang, Zhang, Chong, Cheung, Cheong, Chong, Jang.

Name validators are no better at distinguishing between the variances in pronunciations and spellings in names that have been converted from non-Roman alphabets. So when you’re entering client data, be sure that someone with the name George Li isn’t really George Lee; or Debbie Whang isn’t really Debbie Wang.

I’ve researched the top last names, based on data collected from 140 Million social network users worldwide. Here’s a list of the top 50, arranged from the highest frequency rate to the lowest. How social is your last name? Do you see it in the list?

No. Frequency Surname
1 913,465 smith
2 571,819 johnson
3 512,312 jones
4 503,266 williams
5 471,390 brown
6 386,764 lee
7 360,010 khan
8 355,639 singh
9 343,220 kumar
10 324,972 miller
11 311,576 davis
12 280,747 wilson
13 277,466 taylor
14 263,054 thomas
15 260,203 garcia
16 258,501 anderson
17 245,078 sharma
18 236,778 martin
19 236,338 rodriguez
20 230,068 ali
21 226,143 white
22 225,097 jackson
23 223,170 thompson
24 221,085 moore
25 214,823 ahmed
No. Frequency Surname
26 201,310 martinez
27 199,151 lopez
28 188,844 harris
29 187,711 patel
30 185,105 king
31 177,520 walker
32 175,455 hernandez
33 172,994 clark
34 172,959 lewis
35 171,236 robinson
36 163,959 young
37 157,821 gonzalez
38 157,300 hall
39 155,551 wright
40 155,322 scott
41 154,630 perez
42 154,532 green
43 152,797 allen
44 150,361 tan
45 149,749 shah
46 145,495 roberts
47 144,804 adams
48 143,332 nguyen
49 142,322 james
50 141,683 hill

Posted by: Geoff G.