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