You can see the headlines bemoaning Twitter’s struggle to bolster its 313 million active users and gain advertisers almost daily. And the bad news keeps coming. The company’s disappointing financials July 25 made for more bad headlines. The August 2 resignation of communications director Natalie Kerris, who arrived from Apple in late February and was supposed to be part of Jack Dorsey’s resuscitation of the brand, also spurred headline writers to use negative words (PRN, Feb 29). For example, NBC.com led its story with the header “More Bad News for Twitter....” The resignation two days later of Jim Prosser, Twitter’s head of corporate, revenue and policy communications, didn’t help either.
Despite Twitter’s struggles several prominent people and some brands seem unconcerned. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is an exhaustive Twitter user. The platform has been essential to his campaign. Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign also makes much use of Twitter. Another group, B2C brands, doesn’t seem to be listening to tales of gloom about Twitter either, at least not the brands that have the most consumer engagement, according to data provided exclusively to PR News by Shareablee. As you can see from the chart below, the 30 most-engaged brands registered gains of more than 300% in consumer engagement year over year during Q2. Engagement is defined as consumer retweets and likes.
What the chart fails to show, however, and which is not necessarily good news for Twitter, is that the category owes its power to the top 30 brands. In terms of engagement with consumers, content from the top 30 is much more successful than that of other brands in this category. For example, the top 30 generated 314% more engagement during Q2 2016. All B2C brands engagement was up 23%. The top 30 also generated 36% of all video engagement for the entire category.
But back to our earlier topic: Will the presidential candidates’ Twitter use improve the platform’s fortunes? What if anything will it mean for B2C brands and consumer engagement with their tweets? It’s an open question that we’ll be watching along with Shareablee.
Kobe’s Long Legacy
Moving to our series that looks periodically at the top 30 most-engaged brands, this week we examine U.S. B2Cs on Twitter. Nike Basketball led the way in consumer engagement in Q2 2016, with videos of retiring basketball star Kobe Bryant its most-engaged tweets. The brand’s 609% engagement jump year over year occurred despite it posting just 19% more tweets than the previous year’s Q2. It also was the top brand for video engagement, growing nearly 4,000%; videos were 47% of Nike Basketball’s total engagement.
As a category, U.S. B2C brands generated 28.4 million actions on Twitter, up 24% compared with the same time last year. This occurred in spite of the brands posting 15% fewer tweets. Engagement from video content increased 26% year over year. This helps explain the increase in engagement compared with the same time last year.
Number 2 brand Pokémon grew 967% in consumer engagement, garnering 843,000 consumer engagements. Video also was strong here. The brand’s video engagement rose 805%. The surprise is that the sudden popularity of Pokémon Go had nothing to do with these stellar results. The hit game wasn’t released until Q3. Pokémon’s top tweets referenced Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon games.
Starbucks, Chipotle and Jimmy John’s rounded out the Top 5. All experienced year-over-year engagement improvements: Starbucks was up 199%; Chipotle 695%; and Jimmy John’s 223%. Starbucks’ top content featured new menu items; Chipotle’s most-engaged tweets were punny musical references; and Jimmy John’s pulled by tweeting about its first customer appreciation day featuring $1 subs.
