There will be no fake news here.
We’d like to say we and our data partner Shareablee timed the chart (below), which shows the top 30 most-engaged B2B brands on Twitter, to coincide with the start of the presidency of Donald Trump, a tremendous fan of Twitter.
In fact, one of the first stories to emerge from the White House after President Trump’s inauguration was that the new president assumed Barack Obama’s @POTUS Twitter handle at 12:01pm ET on Inauguration Day.
But back to our fake news dilemma: The truth is Shareablee, which supplies this data exclusively to PR News Pro, and we had this on the schedule months ago.
Now to the chart itself, which tracks brands that are exclusively B2B and brands that are a mix of B2B and B2C, but which have sizeable B2B businesses. Total actions, or engagement, refer to the sum of consumer retweets and likes made about the Twitter posts of the various brands.
As you can see, the brand with the largest Twitter audience, Hootsuite, also led the pack in terms of consumer engagement by a wide margin. The main lesson from this table--that changes occurs slowly when it comes to consumer engagement with B2B brands on Twitter--requires one to go back to Quarter 1 of 2016. In that time period (Jan. 1-Mar. 31), the top B2B brands were Hootsuite, Hubspot, IMG Models Worldwide, Ericsson and Amazon Web Services. Kickstarter was number 6. A glance at the current chart shows how little has changed. Only Ericsson, now down at number 11, has been displaced.
Other measures were similar. Hootsuite had about 200,000 consumer actions in Q1, although it also had far more consumer actions per tweet, at 102. It also enjoyed a considerable lead over the number two brand, Hubspot.
Several things have changed, though, between the quarterly charts. The most striking is that IMG, which in quarter 1 had exhibited the largest growth in engagement, with more than 85,000 Twitter actions, now is a perennial powerhouse. It had in excess of 133,000 actions in the third quarter. What’s steady, however, is that IMG content, mostly pictures of models, seems to attract engagement.
