Ebay crowned king in social media engagement rankings : Alterian

Ebay landed on the top spot due primarily to the firm’s longstanding engagement with their customers through forums since the late 1990s, corporate blogging, Twitter and Facebook. As a prime example of adapting to the times, Ebay adopted Facebook’s Open Graph so that customers can split the cost of a gift and pay only for their share through PayPal.

Ebay not only applies the social approach in its external communications, but internally as well. It has encouraged the use of blogs, forums and discussions on the company intranet.

The rankings were derived from the Social Media Reputation (SMR) Index, developed by Yomego, a social media specialist agency. According to the firm, each brand was given a SMR score which measures the social media ‘noise’ around a brand – that is, how many people are talking about it – and with its popularity, or whether what those people are saying is positive or negative. Then, a ‘recency’ score was added, wherein a brand that is being talked about currently received a higher recency score than one that was talked about six months ago.

Human analysis is then applied to each score to ensure its accuracy, taking into account sentiments such as sarcasm or slang that could be wrongly interpreted by an automated system. In the end, the particular brand is assigned an overall SMR score out of a possible 100.

Chris Tew, senior vice president, Asia-Pacific of Alterian, which provided the social media data and analysis for the index via its analytics tool SM2, noted, “This research shows that brands that rank the highest are those that engage with customers through the right channels, listen to what they are saying, and respond to them transparently and effectively.”

Gucci claimed the distinction of being the highest ranked non-technology firm, coming in at sixth position. It was followed by Ford, MTV, Samsung and Yahoo to complete the top ten.