Twitter – Page 10 – Media Culpa

Top 10 Swedish brands on Twitter

Many brands are considering whether they should have an active presence on Twitter, or not. During the last few years, I have collected close to 500 corporate accounts on my list of Swedish business on Twitter. This list, of course, does not cover all existing corporate accounts, but it is still quite extensive.

About four months ago, I looked at how the top brands, in terms of numbers of followers and Klout score, for example, behaved on Twitter. In January, the list had 350 corporate accounts, now it consists of 471 accounts. You can find my short report from January 2011 on this topic on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/kullin/swedish-businesses-on-twitter. Today I am publishing a quick follow up to that report and what is striking is that the top brands are gaining new followers at a very high rate. The 10 accounts with most followers have on average increased the number of followers by 41% in just four months.

The top 10 Swedish brands on Twitter in terms of number of followers, are (as of May 3, 2011):

H&M (@hm) – 179,900 (82,100) +119%
Spotify (@spotify) – 99,400 (72,000) +38%
Stardoll (@stardoll) – 77,600 (51,100) +52%
Adland (@adland) – 24,500 (21,400) +14%
Acne Online (@acneonline) – 20,500 (14,600) +40%
Ericsson Labs/Tor Bjorn Minde (@ericssonlabs) – 13,700 (10,800) +27%
Ericsson Press (@ericssonpress) – 7,900 (6,100) +30%
Propellerhead (@propellerheadsw) – 7,900 (5,700) +39%
SJ (@SJ_AB) – 7,500 (5,900) +27%
Sony Ericsson DW (@sonyericssondev) – 7,300 (5,900) +24%

(Note: since I collected this data three days ago, Spotify has passed 100,000 followers)

As you can see, brands like H&M are growing their following very fast, +119% in just four months is quite impressive. The top ten are also exactly the same as four months ago, with only one shift in ranking, Propellerhead has climbed from number 10 to number 8.

In January, 60 accounts had more than 1,000 followers. Now, there are 91 accounts with more than 1,000 followers, with a total of 604,000 followers.

Klout score
Spotify is the Twitter account with the highest Klout score: 72. One interesting new entry on the the list of highest Klout scores is the fairly new account by Hilton Stockholm hotel @HiltonStockholm. The Hilton has only been active since November 2010 but has managed to create content that is being spread across Twitter. The account only has 134 followers, but a Klout score of 60, which is quite high. Klout explains this a little: “Hilton Stockholm has a small but tightly formed network that is highly engaged”.

So businesses and brands that are thinking about using Twitter for marketing or customer service should take note, this is a channel that is growing quickly in importance. Consumers and other stakeholders are happy to follow brands on Twitter and along with Facebook this might be the quickest way to build new and lasting relationships with customers, prospects and other influential people online. What are you waiting for?

Disclaimer: there may of course be accounts that I have missed that would make the top ten list.

Spotify the second Swedish brand to reach 100,000 followers on Twitter

Spotify, the digital music service, just reached 100,000 followers on Twitter. That makes it the second Swedish brand to reach that milestone, after H&M (in March 2011). In fact, probably also the second Nordic brand, since I know of no other corporate Twitter accounts from the Nordic countries that has that many followers. Nokia is a strong contender, but the Finnish company is currently at 76,000 followers.

Congratulations to Spotify.

It seems that @MissMarianneH is follower no 100,000.

Footnote: I know that number of followers is not everything, but it is one metric that can be used.

A first look at Summify

I recently signed up for a new service called Summify that “creates a periodic summary of the most relevant news stories, from all of your social networks, and delivers it by email and on the web”. In short, Summify emails you links to stories that your network has shared during the last hours or days.

When I first joined, I only connected my Twitter account to the service. After about one week I wanted to check what types of links Summify had sent me. I had chosen to get 5 links per day, but you can select another frequency and a different number of links. Turns out that a majority of the links are from TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable. In total, 19 out of 35 links are from these three sources.

For me, that is not very valuable. If you are the type of person that check Twitter on a regular basis, you will probably already have seen most of these stories. These three are among the most read social media and tech sites on the web so I have probably already seen the most interesting stuff from them. A typical link, like this one from Mashable, has been tweeted more than 1,400 times and shared 240 times on Facebook in less than a day. I had hoped that I would be exposed to links to stories that would be interesting to me, but that I probably hadn’t seen, not “most tweeted stories”.

On the other hand, you can use Summify as a filter to catch up on the stories that most people talk about. So if you are not a social media junkie who is on Twitter all day, Summify summarizes the most talked about stories, using your friends as a filter. Check Summify and you will be up to date with the latest news.

Now I have also added my Facebook and Google Reader accounts to Summify. Hopefully that will increase the number of sources that Summify sends to me. I will try to follow up this post in a few days to report if there has been any “improvement”.

H&M reaches 200,000 followers on Twitter with glocal strategy

The Swedish clothing retailer H&M reached 100,000 followers on Twitter this week, which is a first for a Swedish company. But that is just for its main account @hm. In fact, H&M is followed by twice as many, if you combine the number of users that follow the company’s 28 Twitter accounts: in total 201,000.

It is very interesting to study H&M’s strategy, to complement a global account with accounts for local markets and that they are branded in a similar fashion (@hm plus country). The company today has one global account with 101,000 followers (@hm), one old general news account that is not used any longer (@HM_News) and 26 geographic accounts (25 countries and one province – Quebec in Canada). To see a full list of accounts, see this list of H&M on Twitter.

Top ten H&M accounts (by number of followers):

@hm – 101,000
@hmusa – 34,500
@hmdeutschland – 11,400
@hmunitedkingdom – 10,800
@hmcanada – 9,800
@hmespana – 7,200
@hmjapan – 5,000
@HM_News (no longer in use) – 4,800
@hmfrance – 2,700
@hmsouthkorea – 2,600

If we compare the countries were H&M has stores and rank them by sales (for stats, see this pdf) we see that Germany, France, USA and the UK are the company’s biggest markets (left column below). But the company has most followers in USA, Germany, UK and Canada (right column below). Switzerland is another top market but H&M does not have a specific Swiss Twitter account yet (Update: there is a Swiss account at @hmsuisse, but it is not yet active). South Korea is one of H&M’s smallest markets, but that local account has already attracted 2,600 followers.

With this strategy H&M is able to reach more than 200,000 people on Twitter, many of them in their local language. All country accounts are in local language except the accounts from the Middle East and Turkey. Update: @hmturkyie is in fact in Turkish.

7th blog anniversary

Yesterday, I had a long talk with a journalist about personal branding and social media. We talked about how I started this blog and how it has developed over the years. As a matter of fact, today I am celebrating seven years of blogging on Media Culpa, which I started on Feb 17, 2004 (actually a little earlier, but those first test posts were deleted before going live on this domain).

To celebrate the occasion, I thought that I would share some small details about the past year for this blog.

72% of my visitors are from outside of Sweden. During the last 12 months, the blog has gotten visitors from 162 different countries/territories, including Turks and Caicos Islands, Kyrgyzstan and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Sweden is the top country (28%), followed by USA (23%) and UK (7.1%).
50% of all visits came from search engines.
Top referring search key words: “twitter handle”.
Most read post, is an old post from 2009: Strategies for choosing Twitter handle (see above).
Most read new post: BP oil spill and social media, which still ranks in the top 10 in Google for “BP oil spill”, between Huffington Post and the Guardian.
Most retweeted post (79 times): Flickr reaches 5 billion photos, which also was picked up by TechCrunch, CNN, BBC and hundreds of blogs.

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Photo credit: Melanie Hughes.