Facebook yesterday released a big ol’ lump of data about the most shared content of 2011, both globally and for specific countries. Osama Bin Laden’s death was far and away the most popular status update topic, followed distantly by the Super Bowl results and and the Casey Anthony trial for second and third most popular, respectively.

When looked at alongside the top Twitter stories for the year, there’s evidently more of a focus on world news and celebrity deaths on Facebook, whereas Twitter seems to respond more to live-tweeting award shows, sport, and breaking news.

Facebook does have more data on what its members are doing than Twitter, however. Looking at user behaviour on artist pages, for instance, they’ve determined that the most listened-to song of the year was Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” followed by Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.’)” and LMFAO’s “Sexy And I Know It” at third.

They’ve also tabulated the fastest-growing pages of 2011, globally:

Fastest Growing Pages

• Actors or TV Personality – Megan Fox

• Movie – Harry Potter

• TV Show – House

• Musician – Rihanna

• Athlete – Leo Messi

• Sports Team – FC Barcelona

 

Unfortunately, South Africa-specific data was not part of this year’s Memology – but there’s a pretty interesting spread between the 10 countries that were profiled individually:

Top Status Trends

• United States – lms (like my status)
• Canada – lms (like my status)

• UK – The Royal Wedding

• India – The Jan Lokpal anti-corruption bill

• France – Sexual assault charges against the International Monetary Fund’s Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn

• Italy – The required 40% voter turnout for June referendum votes to be valid

• Germany – The death of Amy Winehouse

• Brazil – Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts league

• Russia – Steve Jobs

• Spain – Indiginados economic and political representation movement

• Australia – Planking

I mean, I don’t know why Germany was so affected by the death of Amy Winehouse, but it’s good to know that they care.

There’s a fair amount of other stuff available over at Memology – take a look.

[Source: Facebook Memology 2011]