HP, Ford and Sony Top Social Mentions List of Brands

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Global Fortune 100 companies were mentioned a total of 10,400,132 times online during a month-long period, with most of those mentions happening on Twitter. Each company was mentioned an average of 55,970 times on Twitter, yet 18 percent still don’t have accounts to monitor and interact with mentions, according to the third annual Burson-Marsteller Global Social Media Check-Up.

The study examines how Fortune 100 companies use social media sites Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

Since 2011, the number of corporate account followers on social channels has increased dramatically. On Facebook, the average number of Likes per company Page rose 275 percent, to 152,646. Corporate Twitter accounts saw their followers increase threefold, from 5,076 in 2011 to 14,709.

Seventy-nine percent of those corporate Twitter accounts are doing it right, attempting to engage users with retweets and @ mentions.

Over on Facebook, 74 percent of companies have a presence. Ninety-three percent of corporate Pages studied are updated weekly, but only 70 percent are responding to comments on their wall or posts. On average, there are 6,101 people talking about each brand.

The companies with the most social mentions globally are:

1. HP
2. Ford
3. Sony
4. AT&T
5. Samsung
6. Toyota
7. Honda
8. Walmart
9. BP
10. Verizon

Businesses are also using social differently than in years past. Companies, on average, have more social accounts on each platform than ever before; they’re using multiple accounts to hypertarget specific segments of followers based on geography, topic, or service. Back in 2010, 79 percent of companies had at least one social account. That has now risen to 87 percent.

The flipside of that figure, of course, is that 13 percent of companies are being mentioned online and are choosing not to participate in the conversation around their brand. What a waste!

On Facebook, the biggest brands have an average of 10.4 accounts each. Twitter is just slightly lower, with an average of 10.1 accounts per company. Companies have 8.1 YouTube, 2.6 Google+, and 2.0 Pinterest accounts, on average.

As for Google+ and Pinterest adoption, 48 percent and 25 percent of the Global Fortune 100 companies have accounts, respectively. (BrightEdge has also shared some figures on Google+ adoption among big brands.)

YouTube is another popular platform for big brands; 82 percent of companies have accounts. This is an increase of 39 percent over last year. Corporate channels average 2 million views and 1,669 subscribers.

Though most brand mentions are happening on Twitter, forums and blogs are another place companies need to keep an eye on, proactively seeking out and addressing conversations around their business. As noted in this study, the days of scanning through social media mentions each morning are over. Given the volume of activity around the web on various platforms, companies need high-powered monitoring and measurement tools to keep up.

This article was originally published on Search Engine Watch.