The 10 most popular Canadian brands on Facebook – combined – have less than half the fans of Justin Bieber

Canadian brands are flopping on Facebook.

No matter which way you slice it, Canadian brands—and even foreign brands with separate Canadian pages—are underwhelming when it comes to garnering fans on Facebook.

Combining the 10 most popular Canadian brands and brands with dedicated Canadian pages, you arrive at roughly 12 million (depending on which pages you decide to count against your criteria).

This is far from being even half that of Canadian pop sensation Justin Bieber, who currently has more than 31 million fans (ranked number 11 for all Facebook pages in the world).

And if you discount Waterloo’s BlackBerry, which has over 7 million fans, the top 10 Canadian brands would equal only about 5 million fans total—or a mere 16 percent of the “Never Say Never” singer’s.

What does all of this mean? Well, looking at American powerhouses—YouTube’s 40 million fans and Family Guy’s 34 million, for example—Canada is clearly lagging in this department. Even if you use the common population multiple of 10, we’re still choking on America’s dust: we should have a good half-dozen brands with three-million-plus fans. But we don’t. Only one brand is above even two million.

Research in Motion is kicking ass.

Of course, by that token, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry page is doing fucking awesome. I mean, 7.2 million, are you kidding me? By the 10 multiple, this page would have 72 million fans if it was a U.S. brand—the most in the world by more than 25 million! To compare, iPhone has less than three million fans, Windows Phone has less than one million, and no other mobile brands have dedicated pages.

Now you can argue that lots of Americans and others around the world use BlackBerry—not all 7.2 million are Canadian. Which is absolutely correct. But not every fan of the other Canadian brands are necessarily all Canadian either.

The Facebook page for RIM’s mobile product is even more impressive when you consider that the gap—7.2 million to the second place Timmy’s 1.5 million—is astounding: BlackBerry has 500 percent more fans than its next Canadian competitor, versus “Facebook” edging “Texas Hold’em Poker” by a mere 2 percent. If BlackBerry carried its clout over as an American brand, it would have about 230 million fans.

Maybe this all means nothing, given that RIM’s share price has plummeted from $140 to $27 over the past four years. And that its consistently losing market share to competitors like Apple and Google. And that it’s slashed profit forecasts and laid off employees and lost numerous key executives.

But on the Facebook frontier, for whatever it may be worth, RIM is doing a hell of a lot better than any other Canadian—or American—brand.

Bonus: Zynga is insane.

Just for fun, I’d like to point out that two of Zynga’s brands, Texas Hold’em Poker and Farmville, are in the top 10 most-popular Facebook brands in the world, with 45.3 and 32.1 million fans respectively. That combines for a staggering 77.4 million fans for a single brand (and they have other popular games, like Mafia Wars, whose 17.5-million-strong fanbase pushes Zynga’s followers to nearly 100 million).

Nothing much to say there. My brain is too boggled.