The Most Engaged Brands On The Web
What big brands do the best job with social media? A new study by analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint ranks the top 100 brands by social media engagement. You can find the report embedded below or on ENGAGEMENTdb …
Context & Ripple Effects
Charlene Li built her reputation measuring social technology adoption at Forrester Research — she was speaking there on stage at the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Diego as far back as March 2008 — and the ENGAGEMENTdb study marks her first major output since moving to the Altimeter Group. Teaming with wiki startup Wetpaint gives the ranking both analyst credibility and a vendor with a stake in how brands build participatory web properties (Wetpaint had been rumored since early 2008 to be shopping an embeddable wiki product called Balco to big content sites, though that remained unconfirmed).
First-order effects
- Brands landing in the ENGAGEMENTdb top 100 get an external benchmark they can cite internally, while those ranked low face a named, quantified comparison against peers for the first time.
- Altimeter Group and Wetpaint convert a research report into a sales asset: every ranked brand is now a prospective consulting client or platform customer.
Second-order effects
- Media agencies and social-media shops will be pushed to adopt engagement scoring in brand planning, since clients now have a third-party number to hold them against.
- Rival research firms have a template to copy — expect competing brand-engagement indices as measurement becomes the differentiator in a crowded analyst market.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, brand social-media budgets get justified through engagement metrics rather than audience size, making measurement vendors gatekeepers of marketing spend.
- Social platforms' value to marketers comes to rest on how deeply brands can engage there — the question the corpus keeps circling back to, and one later studies kept re-litigating.
The trend: Corporate social media is shifting from experimental presence to benchmarked engagement, with analyst-produced rankings becoming the yardstick brands budget against.