K-CGoundiam

Twitter for business

Nestivity, a social media startup developing community software tools for Twitter, released a list of the top twenty-five brands with the most engaged Twitter audiences. I have been made aware of Nestivity very recently, thanks to a post by Jure Klepic, Feathering Our Community With Nestivity.

According to the start-up, Nestivity turns your Twitter handle into a “Nest”, a place for you to connect with your followers in a more organized and structured way. It sounds promising and if it lives up to its promise, Nestivity would rank as one the solid solutions out there. I am trying it so I will be able to talk to it after I have given it a test drive.

It is only natural for a tool promoting its ability to help you organize, build and grow your Twitter community should have a privileged insight into the most engaged brands. In their recently issued list of the 25 Most Engaged Brands on Twitter, Nestivity has analyzed more than 739,000 Tweets found some pretty interesting data. 6 points worth looking into :

1. Followers count do no count. We knew that but hearing it again will not hurt and might help shift the dialogue to more important aspects of community building.
2. Frequency of tweet doesn’t matter, relevance to your community does. This is one of the most asked question out there and yet, it seems that whether you tweet every hour like the @NBA or every month, if your audience cares, they’ll engage with you. Show them some love with content they want to see
3. However, it seems that Timing is everything. Find you sweet spot and leverage it.
4. Quality over quantity. No surprise there but always good to remind brands that point 2 is even more important (ref : Frequency of tweet doesn’t matter )
5. Multimedia is best. There again, studies have shown that people react more and better to images, videos and visuals, in general.

On a personal level, this list makes me ponder. Why did I ever waste my time trying to engage with @Starbucks (As you can see I may be hurt because on top of spending time tweeting them, I’ve spent insane amount of money at the cafes, I feel, in vain. Good, I quit coffee). @Disney never tweeted me back and that would have made a couple of little people in my house pretty happy. And I need to start to tweet @Chanel.

Check out Henry Min’s blog post over at Nestivity and the list of 25 Most Engaged Brands on Twitter (Click to enlarge)

So, what’s you take on the top 25 and the honorable mentions? Would love to hear your experience and thougts.

Karima-Catherine Goundiam is a Toronto-based consultant in digital and social media. She can be reached on Twitter,  LinkedIn or on her blog.

Initially published on www.3angelsmarketing.com
 

Altimeter Group recently revealed that, for an overwhelming proportion, corporate social media strategists report to Marketing and Corporate communications departments. In the same report, it was confirmed that the main concern of the corporate social strategist for 2011 is to create ROI measurements.

It was already Marketers’ main preoccupation last year , as it was detailed in the eMarketer Online Brand Measurement Report, 2009

Read more

Liberté, égalité, fraternité, French for “Liberty, equality, fraternity“ – is the French national motto that has inspired this post: Is social media the social equalizer?

Events such as the French revolution, leaders like Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, make us all wish these three words were true.

Social media seems to congregate intellectual freedom, equality and fraternity. Sure, we will tend to lean towards people like us, sharing the same values as us, the same ideals; however, mutual respect and acceptance will come from our thoughts, output and virtual manners.

The 3 words resonate as follows:

Liberty of thoughts, of information; liberty to share what we are about. It is really up to us to decide if we want to put it all out there, whether we are a hotshot offline or a regular person trying to make it;

Equality – whether, we are a woman, a man, disabled, black, white or blue, we have the possibility to build a share of voice as much as another. We establish our credibility with our hard work .

And finally, fraternity, because, social media has managed to break down, at least, a few barriers – social and physical. The importance is that We are humans and we care!

Am I too optimistic to think that our physicality is not as important anymore? Most of us have a profile picture that gives a limited glimpse into our being, some will use avatars, and also others will use company logos. Whatever the decision, visualizing who we are talking to remains of small importance in building meaningful relationships.

I deeply hope that social media will succeed where politics, society and religion have mostly failed. I believe social media can bring us together on a more noble level where indeed, it is What we are, Who we truly are that matters.