Social Media Engagement Improves Financial Performance
By Anna Johnson on July 30th, 2009Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group have released a study, the ‘ENGAGEMENTdb Study’ revealing that companies engaged in social media are also seeing improved financial performance.
Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group studied the world’s 100 most valuable brands as measured by BusinessWeek / Interbrand ‘Best Global Brands 2008′ rankings to see how their engagement in social media translated into financial performance.
It turns out that the greater the level of social media engagement, the greater the improvement in financial performance over the last 12 months.
In particular, companies defined as social media ‘mavens’ – engaged in seven or more social media channels with an above-average engagement score – had the greatest improvements in revenues (an average increase of 18 percent), gross margins (15 percent increase) and net margins (4 percent increase).
The social media channels considered were blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis and discussion forums.
So which of the world’s top brands were the most engaged in social media? The top 10 were:
- Starbucks
- Dell
- eBay
- Microsoft
- Thomson Reuters
- Nike
- Amazon
- SAP
- Yahoo!/Intel (Tie)
You can get the ENGAGEMENTdb report here: http://www.engagementdb.com/Report
