The {SLING} blog

How Many of a Brand’s Twitter Followers Talk About the Brand?

While some brands tout their high number of Twitter followers, the more important statistic is how many of these followers actually talk about or engage with them.

Since this isn’t a readily-available number, we analyzed the Fortune 100 companies that are active on Twitter to determine how many of their 19 million followers talk about the brands they follow. 

SUMMARY

• On average, 8.8% of a brand’s followers talk about or engage with them on Twitter (tweet this)
• Over 40% of Walmart’s followers talk about them, making it the most talked about big brand, by far! (tweet this)
• Disney is the only Fortune 100 brand with >1M followers to be talked about by more than 10% of its followers (tweet this)

ANALYSIS

We analyzed tweets from over 19 million Twitter users to determine how many of them talk about the large brands they follow.

We also performed this analysis from a brand’s perspective — i.e. what percentage of a brand’s followers talk about them on Twitter?  We analyzed 31** of the Fortune 100 brands to give us insights into this.

The Top 8 Brands

These were the top 8 that were talked about most by their followers. Not surprisingly, each of these is a consumer-facing brand, coming from a variety of industries. As seen here, the top 2 brands are both retailers, with Walmart at #1 and Target at #2.  

Correlation with Number of Followers?

The next thing we decided to look at was whether there was any correlation between the number of followers, and what percentage of their followers talk about them. 

Here’s a scatterplot of the 31 brands.

The law of diminishing returns seems to apply here: the brands with a low number of followers are finding high proportional engagement. But, as followers grow, the percentage of people talking about the brand decline.

While this was true overall, some big brands performed extremely well.  Specifically, Disney (19% with 1.45M followers) was the one brand that stayed well above the 8.8% average as they grew followers. It was the only brand above 1M followers to do so.

Speaking of average and trendline…

Average ‘Talking About’ for Brands

After studying the tweets of 19 million users and the 31 brands they follow, we learned that, on average, 8.8% of a brand’s followers talk about them each month.

For the mathematically inclined, the equation for the linear trendline was:
y = -3E-08x + 0.147, with R^2 = 0.08

Hope this study gives brands some insights on how many of their followers they can expect to talk about them.

Another important takeaway is not to base decisions solely on the small percentage of users who mention their brand. Rather, there’s a silent majority out there, who have an affiliation to the brand but don’t talk about them, that can be mined for information as well. 

** Of the Fortune 100 brands, we decided to analyze the ones that were active on Twitter and also had more than 50,000 followers. This resulted in 32 brands. We also removed Amazon from this list because it was a clear outlier — given its online nature, most Amazon-related conversations were products being shared by people, which would skew the data — leaving us with 31 brands for analysis.

ABOUT {SLING}

{SLING} is a Twitter ads optimization service that identifies and targets all of an audience’s interests for significant efficiencies. Our Audience Intelligence system has helped companies like MTV and Edelman improve their campaign reach by 50%+.

Looking for insights on your followers? Reach out, we’d be happy to help.