Twitter | Media Culpa

Amtrak doubles number of Twitter followers with Promoted Accounts

Ever wondered if those sponsored accounts or tweets on Twitter pay off? Well, here are some fresh numbers from Amtrak, the US passenger train service operator which started using Twitter’s Promoted Accounts ad placement on April 12. At that time the @Amtrak account had 10,000 followers and added between 20 and 60 new followers per day. With the ad on Promoted Accounts Amtrak started gaining a lot more followers, as you can see by the graph below.

According to the article, Amtrak tracked 8,000 new followers from the Promoted Accounts campaign. The company also tried the Promoted Tweets ad placement and today boasts some 22,000 followers.

It is not clear from the article when Amtrak used Promoted Tweets (it says during last month) or if they ran the two campaigns simultaneously at some point. It would have been interesting to see which type attracted the most followers.

See influence on Twitter with improved Chrome extension from PeerIndex

I use Chrome as my default web browser and I have added two different Chrome extensions that let me determine the influence of a Twitter account directly on Twitter.com. The first one is by Klout and it lets you see the Klout score of a Twitter user, right next to the user’s name.

I have also used a Chrome extension for PeerIndex, but it only displayed the score if you clicked on a person’s profile.

Today I noticed that PeerIndex have upgraded their extension and now when I visit Twitter.com I see this in my feed:

I now see the PeerIndex score next to each account’s Twitter handle, but also all the other accounts that are mentioned in each tweet. If you click on it you are taken directly to the account page on PeerIndex for more details. Also, if I drag the mouse over the score box, it shows a more detailed score of authority, activity and audience, and also some tags that represent the top topics by this Twitter user. This may be used to more quickly get a better picture of different Twitter users and people you may or may not want to follow. If Klout and PeerIndex scores are accurate tools for determining real influence, well that’s an entirely different blog post.

Footnote: My PeerIndex profile is here.

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.

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.

Logo or no logo – How to brand your company on Twitter

In a recent post on the {grow} blog, Mark Schaefer discussed if brands should use a logo or a face as avatar on Twitter. The post “Your company’s single biggest mistake on Twitter” argues that brands would be better off by being more personal and use a photo of a person instead of a logotype. That would make it easier for followers to connect to the company on Twitter.

“If all you want to do is broadcast press releases, than go ahead and “go logo.” But if you want to create some authentic connection with your audience, I strongly recommend you put a face on the account.”

For larger companies or brands, I don’t think that’s a good idea. It might work for really small companies or for accounts that have a certain niche, like R&D or some other expert, but not for the main corporate account. Todd Defren yesterday published an email conversation about this topic that he had with his colleagues, and several of these arguments sound reasonable to me.

“I think a face is weird because it’s a company/entity not a person and as you say, people leave/change. And some logos are iconic and memorable … My son knew companies by their logos before he could read, and now he is probably a Starbucks lifer. But I might just be the oddball here.”
– Cathy

“Personally I identify with logos as well. It’s brand recognition. I don’t like Comcast or Pfizer more because they have a face or several faces (which can be confusing in itself!) associated with their Twitter handle. People identify with meaningful content, messages and customer service. That’s my two cents.”
– Melanie

“Agree on logos having a place. You can still be personable (and a person) within that brand. Consumers need to identify with you and the company that you represent.”
– Louise

The largest Swedish corporate accounts
I don’t believe at all that it is not possible to engage in conversation with customers if you have a logo as avatar. Let’s have a look at some of the most popular Swedish corporate accounts. The account with most followers is H&M (@hm). As much as 67% of its tweets are replies, which shows a high degree of conversation with other users. The second most followed account is Spotify (@spotify). 71% of its tweets are replies. Another example in the top ten is SJ (@sj_ab) with 91% replies.

As a comparison, both Mark Schaefer and I have a lower share of replies: 42% of our tweets are replies to others. Of course, that is no evidence that one strategy is better than the other, but I think it shows that is is possible to engage with customers on Twitter and still use a corporate logo.

The image below shows the 100 Swedish corporate Twitter accounts with most followers, from H&M (#1) to Björn Borg (#100). Only two of them have a photo of the person behind the account. A few use an image of the product (the Ice Hotel and Scania Group), but the vast majority use a logo.

Here is our list of more than 440 Swedish corporate Twitter accounts.

Footnote: Stats of %replies from Tweetstats.com