Which brands are most engaged in social media today? Interestingly, we have two different sources of rankings for the top 100 brands. Unfortunately, the two sources also have very different methodologies and results.
- Tracks the Top 100 brands, as defined by Business Week
- Tracks 40 attributes
- Tacks the number of social media channels a brand is involved in
- Factors in financial performance to test if financial performance and social media engagement go hand-in-hand
- Tracks social media conversations of over 2,000 brands on a daily basis
- Calculates a score based on frequency of usage, the size of the social media environment and the magnitude of the conversation.
The two different methodologies can produce radically different results for Technology companies (some examples):
- Google is ranked #2 by ENGAGEMENdb, but is not in the Top 100 for Vitrue.
- SAP is ranked #4 by ENGAGEMENTdb, but is not in the Top 100 for Vitrue.
- Cisco is randed #7 by ENGAGEMENTdb, but is only ranked #81 by Vitrue
- IBM is ranked #11 by ENGAGEMENdb, but is only ranked #77 by Vitrue.
Conclusions
- Both studies are interesting and potentially useful, especially for tracking social media trends over time or benchmarking companies within an industry.
- Both studies need to be taken with a grain of salt until more is known about their methodologies and why they produce such different results.
- A little more transparency on how the scores are calculated would help users of this data to understand how to best use it. They are clearly measuring different things.
