Linsanity Exploding Online

Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks Point Guard, has been a sensation over the past few weeks and his influence on social media has grown to something he, and nobody else, could have never imagined.  Lin went from being released from two teams and riding the bench for the Knicks to seizing the starting point guard job and putting up superstar statistics.  He is the new king of social media when it comes to athletes; not too bad for somebody that nobody even knew of a month ago. 

FACEBOOK

Lin got Facebook in August of 2010 but as of yesterday he officially has a public Facebook page.  For just opening his official public page yesterday, the amount of subscribers he has is insane - 79,263 in just over 24 hours (he created this page at 2:00 a.m. on Monday morning).  What else?  By adding a profile picture to his public page, he received 7,112 likes, 476 comments, and 187 shares.  Most people are lucky if anybody even remembers what their profile picture is, let alone if they have any likes or comments.  On his personal Facebook page he has 932,236 subscribers as of today.  Not only is the amount of subscribers impressive, but 64% (593,277) of those people are "talking about him".  His status updates have shot through the roof with popularity; take a look at the images below from an update before the surge and an update after.

Before the Linsanity

After the Linsanity

This comes to a 2,980% increase in likes and a 5,322% increase in comments.  Not to mention the amount of people who are sharing what he is saying, only helping to add to his popularity.

TWITTER

 

Lin has been a hit on Twitter, too.  He is well on his way to 500,000 followers and has increased his presence miraculously since his debut.  Take a look at the graph below to see how his rise to fame started and quickly advanced after his big game on February 8th, 2012.  

He is the #879 ranked Twitter user out of over 2,000,000 users (100,000,000 that are active).  His Twitter handle has been mentioned over 215,000 times and his named mentioned over 2.5 million times.

YOUTUBE

Lin's videos on YouTube are also getting high clicks.  Even the videos that were produced and uploaded before Lin became famous are now getting a piece of the celebrity pie.  The video "How to Get into Harvard” has been watched hundreds of thousands of times during the past few weeks and currently is sitting at 2,115,364 views.

 IT'S EVERYWHERE

Besides social media, other places are seeing a boost, too.

• Traffic to NYKnicks.com has increased 550% where Lin is featured on the homepage with a large photo.
• A meet and greet with Jeremy Lin for charity (Garden of Dreams Foundation) raised over $42,000.
• His 2010-11 signed rookie card is currently on eBay with the high bid at $20,090.
• eBay is advertising him on their front page, "Get in on the insanity, Score the gear here!"
• The top five most watched videos on NBA.com since February 4th are all Lin related, each with an enormous amount of views.
• Lin's game-used jersey from December 28th sold for $40,000 after he played for 1 minute and 28 seconds.
• NY Knicks made up 17% of NBA sales before Linsanity; it has since hit 52%.
• And he may have even inspired what could be the very first hashtag haircut.