Twitter Tops List of 2012's Most 'Social Brands' With 2.8B Mentions

Not only is Twitter the place where most online conversations are unfolding, it's also the brand most likely to be mentioned in those conversations. Research conducted by the social-media analytics firm Infegy -- which has ad-agency clients such as MEC and Ogilvy PR -- found that Twitter was far and away the most "social brand" of 2012 with mentions in more than 2.8 billion posts. Runners-up Apple and Facebook were far behind, with mentions in roughly 1.1 billion and 1 billion posts, respectively. The posts examined come from three sources, according to Infegy's CEO Justin Graves. The Twitter firehose and public Facebook posts (roughly 1 to 2 million each day) account for roughly 60% of the data, while blogs and news sites where people are leaving comments make up the other 40%. Infegy's web crawler is largely looking for RSS feeds in the latter instance. Mr. Graves noted that there's a "channel bias" that helps account for tech brands' domination of the top 10, which also includes Microsoft, Google, YouTube and Amazon. (Twitter and Apple also occupied the No. 1 and 2 spots last year.) The non-tech outliers were No. 5 Disney (greatly helped by its acquisition of Lucasfilm and the "Star Wars" franchise in October), No. 6 LG, and No. 10 BBC. "Even though they're the chief British news outlet, [the BBC gets] cited and referenced all over the place," Mr. Graves explained. Sentiment also counts for a lot in the rankings, which are scored by multiplying positivity percentage by total posts. For instance, Nike's 93% positivity score, which was enabled by well-received new products such as the Nike+ FuelBand, catapulted the brand into the No. 11 spot even though it had fewer mentions than the five brands that come after it: Ford, the NBA, Sony, the NFL and McDonald's.

Twitter Tops List of 2012's Most 'Social Brands' With 2.8B Mentions

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