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The Billboard Social 50 is a popularity chart which ranks the most active musical artists on the world's leading social networking services. Its data, published by Billboard magazine and compiled by Next Big Sound, is based collectively on each artist's weekly additions of friends, fans and followers, along with artist website views and streaming media. Bill Werde, the former editorial director of Billboard, called the Social 50 "yet another step" in the evolution of the magazine and an "important response to our changing times". The chart initially only retrieved its data from YouTube, Vevo, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and iLike to create its ranking, but in November 2012 was expanded to include SoundCloud and Instagram. Data from Vine and Tumblr were added to the chart in June 2015.
The Billboard Social 50 was launched on December 11, 2010. The first artist to reach number one on the chart was Barbadian singer Rihanna. Since debuting, she has spent a total of 21 weeks at the top of the chart. Canadian singer Justin Bieber holds the record for the most weeks at number one, with 139. He also holds the record for the most consecutive weeks at number one, with 24. American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift follows Bieber and Rihanna with 26 weeks at number one. Following her death in December 2012, American singer Jenni Rivera became the first and only artist to top the chart posthumously. Since its launch, 20 artists have reached the top spot on the Billboard Social 50. Three of these artists—Rivera, Skrillex and Justin Timberlake—have only reached the spot for a single week.
On October 2016, the South Korean boy band, BTS landed the number one spot on the Social 50 chart, the boy group becoming the first K-Pop act to reach first place on the chart.