Business | Media Culpa

Amtrak doubles number of Twitter followers with Promoted Accounts

Ever wondered if those sponsored accounts or tweets on Twitter pay off? Well, here are some fresh numbers from Amtrak, the US passenger train service operator which started using Twitter’s Promoted Accounts ad placement on April 12. At that time the @Amtrak account had 10,000 followers and added between 20 and 60 new followers per day. With the ad on Promoted Accounts Amtrak started gaining a lot more followers, as you can see by the graph below.

According to the article, Amtrak tracked 8,000 new followers from the Promoted Accounts campaign. The company also tried the Promoted Tweets ad placement and today boasts some 22,000 followers.

It is not clear from the article when Amtrak used Promoted Tweets (it says during last month) or if they ran the two campaigns simultaneously at some point. It would have been interesting to see which type attracted the most followers.

Avatars of 500 Swedish corporate Twitter accounts

Back in February there was a discussion among a few bloggers about whether it was best for brands to have their logo or a face as avatar on Twitter. I commented that most of the Swedish corporate accounts on Twitter have logos as avatars, and many of them still manage to engage in meaningful conversations with stakeholders.

When you are about to decide on what avatar to choose for your corporate account, remember that many Twitter users are following hundreds of other accounts, who tweet several times per day. Their feeds become a continuing stream of updates from different sources and if you want to improve your chances of getting your tweets read, you should make your avatar easily recognizable. Since most users are individuals, my bet is that most avatars on Twitter are faces. That would mean that brands could easily stand out from the crowd if they branded their account in a way, logo or otherwise, that users quickly can recognize.

Do you need some inspiration? Well, to celebrate that the list of Swedish businesses on Twitter now has reached 500, here is a collection of avatars of 500 Swedish corporate Twitter accounts (in order of number of followers to the account). How many can you identify? (Note: the image is made out of two columns with 250 accounts in each, which for example means that Pingdom is #11. For completely accurate ranking, check the list.)

Follow me on Twitter @kullin.

Top 10 Swedish brands on Twitter

Many brands are considering whether they should have an active presence on Twitter, or not. During the last few years, I have collected close to 500 corporate accounts on my list of Swedish business on Twitter. This list, of course, does not cover all existing corporate accounts, but it is still quite extensive.

About four months ago, I looked at how the top brands, in terms of numbers of followers and Klout score, for example, behaved on Twitter. In January, the list had 350 corporate accounts, now it consists of 471 accounts. You can find my short report from January 2011 on this topic on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/kullin/swedish-businesses-on-twitter. Today I am publishing a quick follow up to that report and what is striking is that the top brands are gaining new followers at a very high rate. The 10 accounts with most followers have on average increased the number of followers by 41% in just four months.

The top 10 Swedish brands on Twitter in terms of number of followers, are (as of May 3, 2011):

H&M (@hm) – 179,900 (82,100) +119%
Spotify (@spotify) – 99,400 (72,000) +38%
Stardoll (@stardoll) – 77,600 (51,100) +52%
Adland (@adland) – 24,500 (21,400) +14%
Acne Online (@acneonline) – 20,500 (14,600) +40%
Ericsson Labs/Tor Bjorn Minde (@ericssonlabs) – 13,700 (10,800) +27%
Ericsson Press (@ericssonpress) – 7,900 (6,100) +30%
Propellerhead (@propellerheadsw) – 7,900 (5,700) +39%
SJ (@SJ_AB) – 7,500 (5,900) +27%
Sony Ericsson DW (@sonyericssondev) – 7,300 (5,900) +24%

(Note: since I collected this data three days ago, Spotify has passed 100,000 followers)

As you can see, brands like H&M are growing their following very fast, +119% in just four months is quite impressive. The top ten are also exactly the same as four months ago, with only one shift in ranking, Propellerhead has climbed from number 10 to number 8.

In January, 60 accounts had more than 1,000 followers. Now, there are 91 accounts with more than 1,000 followers, with a total of 604,000 followers.

Klout score
Spotify is the Twitter account with the highest Klout score: 72. One interesting new entry on the the list of highest Klout scores is the fairly new account by Hilton Stockholm hotel @HiltonStockholm. The Hilton has only been active since November 2010 but has managed to create content that is being spread across Twitter. The account only has 134 followers, but a Klout score of 60, which is quite high. Klout explains this a little: “Hilton Stockholm has a small but tightly formed network that is highly engaged”.

So businesses and brands that are thinking about using Twitter for marketing or customer service should take note, this is a channel that is growing quickly in importance. Consumers and other stakeholders are happy to follow brands on Twitter and along with Facebook this might be the quickest way to build new and lasting relationships with customers, prospects and other influential people online. What are you waiting for?

Disclaimer: there may of course be accounts that I have missed that would make the top ten list.

Fans on a plane – KLM paints Facebook fans on a real plane

Do you remember how Porsche tagged one of their cars with the names of each one of their one million fans on Facebook? Well, the airline KLM is pulling a similar stunt now and I love it. With the Facebook application Tile Yourself (http://apps.facebook.com/tileyourself/) you can create a digital tile in the style of traditional Dutch Delft wall tiles by uploading a photo of yourself or any other image. You can also add a quote to the tile.

Some of these tiles are then chosen and will be painted on a real KLM plane.

Here’s my contribution (“Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana” is a quote by Groucho Marx).

A YouTube video explains the concept further:

Via Nick Burcher.

H&M reaches 200,000 followers on Twitter with glocal strategy

The Swedish clothing retailer H&M reached 100,000 followers on Twitter this week, which is a first for a Swedish company. But that is just for its main account @hm. In fact, H&M is followed by twice as many, if you combine the number of users that follow the company’s 28 Twitter accounts: in total 201,000.

It is very interesting to study H&M’s strategy, to complement a global account with accounts for local markets and that they are branded in a similar fashion (@hm plus country). The company today has one global account with 101,000 followers (@hm), one old general news account that is not used any longer (@HM_News) and 26 geographic accounts (25 countries and one province – Quebec in Canada). To see a full list of accounts, see this list of H&M on Twitter.

Top ten H&M accounts (by number of followers):

@hm – 101,000
@hmusa – 34,500
@hmdeutschland – 11,400
@hmunitedkingdom – 10,800
@hmcanada – 9,800
@hmespana – 7,200
@hmjapan – 5,000
@HM_News (no longer in use) – 4,800
@hmfrance – 2,700
@hmsouthkorea – 2,600

If we compare the countries were H&M has stores and rank them by sales (for stats, see this pdf) we see that Germany, France, USA and the UK are the company’s biggest markets (left column below). But the company has most followers in USA, Germany, UK and Canada (right column below). Switzerland is another top market but H&M does not have a specific Swiss Twitter account yet (Update: there is a Swiss account at @hmsuisse, but it is not yet active). South Korea is one of H&M’s smallest markets, but that local account has already attracted 2,600 followers.

With this strategy H&M is able to reach more than 200,000 people on Twitter, many of them in their local language. All country accounts are in local language except the accounts from the Middle East and Turkey. Update: @hmturkyie is in fact in Turkish.

Porsche tags one million Facebook fans on a 911 GT3 R race car

When Porsche reached one million fans on its Facebook page, the German sports car brand decided to celebrate the occasion by thanking its fans, each and every one of them. This video shows how a Porsche 911 GT3 R hybrid race car gets tagged with the names of one million Facebook fans and you can even search the names to see if you were one of them.

I wonder how many of these fans that are Porsche employees? Porsche recently said it blocked employee access to social networks like Facebook to prevent industrial espionage.

Via We Are Social.