Twitter Measurement

For this blog, I will select a company that has a Twitter profile and examine the content and conversations. I will use Sony as my company for this exercise. My analysis will be based on results acquired from TwitterCounter, RetweetRank, and stat.brandtweet.com.

TwitterCounter:

Here is a screenshot of the results.

Using the website twittercounter.com, I compared the Twitter activity between Sony and two of its competitors Samsung and Nokia. Based on the results, Sony had over a one hundred thousand less followers than its two competitors, over the last three months.

When looking exclusively at Sony’s Twitter activity over the past three months results showed 240,264 followers. Sony averaged +439 followers per day during that span (+327 followers yesterday). Additionally, Sony continued an upward trend of Tweets and currently is listed with 6,744 Tweets.

RetweetRank:

I compared Sony to one of its top competitors in a variety of markets, Samsung. Here are the screen shots for the two companies.

As the results show, Sony is lagging behind Samsung in every category. This comparison shows that Sony has over 87 thousand followers and nearly 150 thousand less following. Even though Sony ranked in the 97.87 percentile, Samsung ranked in the 99.44 percentile with a significantly lower rank (25,412 vs. 96,566).

stats.brandtweet.com:

Here is the screenshot of a comparison between Sony and Samsung using stats.brandtweet.com.

These results show that Sony has an edge in the Twitter war. Even though Samsung received a higher Twitter score (99.5), Sony had the better numbers when it came to Fans 1044 v. 906, and Conversation Quotient (CQ) 74% v. 52%. Sony also had a higher Retweet Quotient (RQ) 31% and Link Quotient (LQ) 75%.

Sony’s Twitter profile is mainly used a promotional tool. The majority of the tweets made by Sony revolved around some sort of promotion…whether it is a new product, artist visiting offices, or movie promotion.

The main difference I see between Sony and Samsung’s profiles is the focus on customer interaction. Samsung’s Twitter page is filled with a variety of posts made by customers utilizing their Samsung products. Sony’s page comes across as corporate America trying to sell you something. The similarity between these two companies is that they both promote new products on their twitter profiles. Fans who are followers to their Twitter feeds can receive up-to-date information on the latest innovations.

The recommendation I would make, in order to improve Sony’s Twitter profile, would be to make it more customer centric. Looking at Samsung’s profile, the listed website is blog.samsung.com. While Sony’s listed website is www.sony.com. This subtle difference implies that the interaction with Samsung is on a personal level. The effect can be seen in the amount of followers, comments, and retweets shown above.

Blogs are viewed as places where opinions can be expressed and concerns shared. Customers feel more comfortable interacting in this type of forum rather than some corporate website. Sony can alter their image as being “machine driven” by making customer views the focal point of their social media.

References: http://www.retweetrank.com/samsung/; http://www.retweetrank.com/sony/; http://stats.brandtweet.com; http://twitter.com/Samsung; http://twitter.com/sony; http://twittercounter.com/compare/Sony/samsung/nokia/week/followers.