Going by its tradition of introducing many firsts in the industry, Zee TV introduced a new awards category at this year's Zee Cine Awards.

With the growing popularity of the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and its influence on the youth of today, Zee Cine Awards devised a special award to honor the actor who enjoyed maximum adoration from his/her fans.

The channel roped in experts at Asterii Analytics to find out who has the biggest fan following. And their data revealed that the person who emerged numero uno was none other than Dabangg Salman Khan.

The research showed that the Salman had 7,408,859 fans on Facebook, 3,188,226 followers on Twitter, 60,567 videos on YouTube, 577,919 followers on Twitter fan clubs, 757,057 fans on Facebook fan clubs and 2,774 followers on Google+.

A source from Asterii Analytics said, `We used sophisticated web analysis tools to scan millions of pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Youtube, Blogs and online forums to quantify the total volume of buzz and conversations on our Cine stars. A specially designed 4 phase methodology was used."


"A shortlist of 30+ possible candidates was developed in the 1st phase of the selection process. We developed 25 parameters to rank the candidates on the total volume of buzz, the consistency of the conversations, the responsiveness and volume of buzz by the fans, the quality and sentiment of these conversations and know indicators of influence scores."

"Finally these 25 parameters were given weights to accurately reflect the relative influence of a specific channel using channel volume data tempered with factors agreed by the experts at Asterii Analytics.

" Using this 4 phase process we came to a single score and the top three candidates were Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan. And the winner was --- Salman Khan with a consistently high score on each of the mediums that was scanned,` the source said.