Introducing the SocialRank Index
The Twitter Activity of the World’s Biggest Brands
When we first launched SocialRank, it was out of a pretty whimsical desire to see who our best followers were on Twitter. But as we continued building out our product and saw the types of accounts flowing in to use it, we realized that we’d stumbled upon a much larger challenge.
Our conversations about the things we like have moved online. Brands recognize this and they spend billions of dollars trying to build a social media presence. Unfortunately, for far too many companies, “presence” means racking up followers — without any regard to quality. This is largely a voodoo metric that undermines the efforts of brands to create meaningful experiences for their fans and potential customers.
They don’t really know what kind of mileage they are getting out of their investment in social media. How are they performing in relation to their competitors? Does it really matter that they have more followers than anyone else in their industry? Are they ultimately focusing on the wrong things?
Currently there’s no publicly available standard out there for them to figure that out. So we built it.
We’ve started with just Twitter, but we’ll be expanding to other platforms as well.
Meet the SocialRank Index
The SocialRank Index reads a lot like a Bloomberg stock chart — except instead of tracking stock prices, we’re tracking industry-wide follower and engagement levels on Twitter.
So if a digital marketer at @SoulCycle visits the Global Brands Index, she may discover that the biggest global brands on average have more followers than SoulCycle. But then she’ll dig deeper into the specific data and realize that SoulCycle’s followers are on average much more engaged.
With the SocialRank Index, innovative brands can take the guesswork out of social media. Instead of being in the game of collecting more and more followers, they now have the data to focus on the brand’s heart and soul: the quality of followers and engagement.
Global Brands
Today we are releasing the first index — or as our inner dork calls it, our “genesis index.”
The flagship Index was inspired by Interbrand’s Best Global Brands of 2014. The companies that make up this Index are everyone from Nike and Starbucks to Coca Cola and Nintendo. These are the most iconic brands in the world, and so it will be interesting to see how their followers are engaging with them.
The Global Brands Index will be the default index when landing on the homepage of the SocialRank Index.
Metrics
We’ve broken the metrics down into two broad categories: Followers and Engagement.
Within these categories, we track stats such as: total followers, verified followers, top locations, total engagement, mentions, @replies, retweets, and more. These are all refreshed on an hourly basis. To see a detailed breakdown of these metrics, please visit our FAQ here. Brand managers often fall into the trap of looking at just Total Followers to gauge success. The SocialRank Index helps them dig deeper into the vast world of Twitter data to uncover more meaningful metrics.
One notably powerful metric is Mentions from Followers vs. Everyone. How often are your followers mentioning you in a Tweet? How often are people who aren’t following you mentioning you in a Tweet? This breakdown opens up a whole new discussion for marketing teams.
The people mentioning you who aren’t following you might be potential customers that you just haven’t engaged with yet. Or maybe they are unsatisfied customers turning to Twitter to vent. Either way, this metric gives a brand a deeper look into who is talking about them on social media.
Note: All of the numbers tracked refer to the averages across the single index you’re viewing. For example, for “Total Followers” in the Global Brands Index, we just added up the number of followers that every brand in an index has, then calculated the average.
SocialRank Dashboard
Once you see the index, you might think, “That’s nice, but how do I see how my account is doing?”
Simple. Just log in to SocialRank with your Twitter account, and you will be dropped into the dashboard, where all your individual data will be displayed. You’ll be able to see all the metrics listed in the previous section, except specific to your own account.
In the dashboard, you will also be able to directly compare your numbers to the various indexes. Here is where a brand like @SoulCycle would be able to quickly see how it stacks up against the Global Brands Index. The idea here is to help brands understand what the industry average looks like and how they are performing across the metrics that matter to them.
Next Steps
Over the next few weeks and months, we will be rolling out more indexes ranging from sports, music, and retail to universities, nonprofits, and airlines. Our goal is to help change the game for customer-obsessed brands, looking at the right data so brands can make more informed decisions. Because this is a huge undertaking, we won’t be perfect right away, but we’ll be continuously improving on what you see today.
The social media world is often misunderstood. At SocialRank, we’re trying to clean up the mess and help brands more easily understand what’s really going on. At a micro-level, we want them to be able to know everything about their followers (what do they like, where do they live, how often do they engage with you, etc). With Market Intelligence, we want them to be able to know everything about their competitors’ followers. And finally, with the SocialRank Index and Dashboard, we want brands to be able to see at a high level how their social media activity stacks up against the rest of their industry.
With these three pieces tied together, we hope to get a stronger pulse of the social media world (starting with Twitter) and help brands better connect with their customers.
If you are interested in what we are building, please reach out to us (Index@SocialRank.com) or Ammar (Ammar@SocialRank.com), as he is running the SocialRank Index, with any ideas of metrics to track or indexes to build.
