[Rob Leathern, Optimal CEO] A friend of mine is an executive producer of ABC’s Shark Tank. I thought it would be fun to look at our Optimal Keyword Expander and see the other similar interests that Shark Tank fans on Facebook have. Here are the top interests, some of them are intuitive, and others not – but that’s what makes social media so much fun, isn’t it? Note that the Shark Tank audience on FB is still fairly small – and that fans of the show from the data it seems skew towards potential participants more than the viewers themselves. This is the US reach only as well as % Gender and average age of each group.

Realtors are into the show, as well as fans of the Apprentice (Donald Trump’s big success). There are also some regional interests that pop up somewhat unexpectedly. (Note that the #’s indicate targetable topics in Facebook – all the data above is targetable in FB with ads). People often ask me about some of the weird things that show up in the social media data, what my thoughts are on them – and as someone who’s worked with lots and lots of data over the past 15 years I tell them it’s awesome, because the real world is messy and there are unexpected correlations in daily life that sometimes we as marketers and market researchers wash away in the name of “cleaning up” the data.

Expect the unexpected. More of this data is available with a free registration at http://optimalsocial.com (note to visitors: we do not aggregate TV shows or movie titles in the Optimal Index, just companies or products)