Social Media + Engagement = Increased Financial Performance

 {pic via here::special thanx}

The Altimeter Group, released a study earlier this year, in July- titled “ENGAGEMENTdb: Deep Brand Engagement Correlates with Financial Performance.”
The study looked at  how 100 of the most valuable brands engaged in 11 different online social media channels {i.e., blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums }.
Engagement was measured by, both, the breadth and depth of  involvement.  Content and interaction, i.e., response to blog comments.  Each brand was give a numerical score.

The top 10 ENGAGEMENTdb brands with their scores are:

1.Starbucks (127)
2.Dell (123)
3.eBay (115)
4.Google (105)
5.Microsoft (103)
6.Thomson Reuters (101)
7.Nike (100)
8.Amazon (88)
9.SAP (86)
10.Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)
    ** Scores for overall brand engagement ranged from a high of 127 to a low of 1.

What researchers concluded was that ,clearly,  engagement directly correlates to financial performance.
The companies with the greatest breadth and depth- the top preformers  "on average grew 18% in revenues over the last 12 months, compared to the least engaged companies who on average saw a decline of 6% in revenue during the same period. The same holds true for two other financial metrics, gross margin and net profit".

The study also examined the best practices of four companies:: Starbucks, Dell, SAP, and Toyota.  These four key traits were discovered: {1} Emphasize quality, not just quantity, {2} scale engagement, make social media part of everyone’s job, {3} doing it all may not be for you — but you must do something, and {4} find your sweet spot.


Read  the nineteen page report or visit the main site.  Take the survey to find out  where your company ranks in the area of engagement across the social media channels.  Get real interactive with the site feature that affords you the the ability to see the rankings in different ways, from highest to lowest scores, alphabetical, etc.