Notice anything different about your friends on Facebook? Suddenly they all look a bit more like celebrities! The latest trend to hit Facebook has been to replace your profile picture with one of your celebrity doppelganger. Last week, the top 2 search terms including the word ‘celebrity’ were ‘what celebrity do I look like’ and ‘celebrity look alike’. Also in the top 10 search term variations were queries for celebrity lookalike generators.

The top website last week to benefit from the celebrity profile picture trend was MyHeritage who received 35% of the clicks from searches for ‘what celebrity do I look like’. The market share of visits to celebrity.myheritage.com increased 500% for the week ending Jan. 30, 2010 as compared to the previous week. Similarly, visits to FaceDouble, another celebrity lookalike generator, increased 200% from the previous week.

These trends can offer a good opportunity for customer acquisition, for example, last week 32% of the upstream traffic to celebrity.myheritage.com was from Facebook and 90% of the visitors were new to the site (meaning they had not visited in the past 30 days). The challenge will be keeping those visitors once a new trend hits Facebook & the Internet.