SocialHow Do You Stack Up Against Top Brands on Twitter? [Study]

How Do You Stack Up Against Top Brands on Twitter? [Study]

Social analytics company Simply Measured analyzed 200 companies, both big and small, to see what they were up to on Twitter, including looking at average follower size, quarterly growth, and engagement levels. Here are some top findings.

Interested in some baseline data for Twitter that will help you gauge how your brand stacks up against others in the microblogging platform? Social analytics company Simply Measured analyzed Twitter accounts of the Interbrand 2013 Top 100 Brands (“Interbrand”) and the Forbes 100 Best Small Companies in America (“Forbes”) to get a picture of what enterprise brands and small businesses are doing on Twitter.

Here’s a snapshot of how large brands and small companies fare on Twitter comparatively:

bigr-brands-vs-small-biz-twitter-simply-measured

Follower Volume

Of those big businesses in the Interbrand list, the majority (58 percent) had 100,000 or more followers on Twitter at the time of this study, with 17 percent garnering 1 million plus.

enterprise-brand-follower-volume-simply-measured

Of those companies in the Forbes list, 17 percent had 5,000 or more followers, while 3 percent had 50,000 or more.

follower-volume-small-business-simply-measured

Follower Growth

For those who are looking to benchmark follower growth against other enterprise brands on Twitter, Simply Measured data showed average follower growth per quarter for the Interbrand list was 20 percent.

quarterly-follower-growth-simply-measured

Brands with less than 1 million followers had a follower growth rate between 18 and 23 percent quarterly. Brands with more than 1 million followers had a 14 percent growth rate.

Engagement

For this study, Simply Measured added the following together to track engagement metrics:

  • Direct responses to tweets by users
  • Mentions by users
  • Retweets by users
  • Favorite status by users

Not surprisingly, audience size affected engagement for the Interbrand companies, according to the data. From the report:

“We calculate ‘Engagement per Tweet’ by excluding direct @replies and Retweets that the brand posts, to ensure that we’re calculating these figures based on their own content. The 40 percent of brands with under 100k followers average only 16 engagements per Tweet, while the top performing brands have between 750-999k followers, and average 289 engagements per tweet.”

audience-size-simply-measured

“Grow your audience,” Simply Measured stated in the report. “Since engagement per tweet as well as total engagement are highly affected by audience size, you should focus at least some of your time and budget on growing your audience.“

Content

Research shows visual content is outperforming plain old text across social networks. Simply Measured data supports this idea with its analysis of the Interbrand companies.

“Looking at some of the top link types, it’s no surprise that the highest performing links are pic.twitter.com links, which is Twitter’s image service, and allows photos to display directly in a user’s Twitter feed,” Simply Measured reported.

visual-content-simply-measured

What sort of updates fall short on Twitter? According to Simply Measured, Bit.ly links “are some of the lowest performing links we see large brands using.”

To download the entire study, go here.

Resources

The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index
whitepaper | Analytics

The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

8m
Data Analytics in Marketing
whitepaper | Analytics

Data Analytics in Marketing

10m
The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook
whitepaper | Digital Marketing

The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook

1y
Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study
whitepaper | Digital Marketing

Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study

1y