BBC one of the top ten most retweeted brands on Twitter

by @gordonmacmillan, posted on 9 March, 2012 at 10:30 am, filed under Social Media and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

What’s the Holy Grail of Twitter? According to most it is followers and once you have them what you need is retweets.

This study from Track Social names what it says are the Top Ten most retweeted brands in the US. It is an odd mix of religion, sport and news, but the BBC is in there too.

Track Social: Retweets Per Day For Brands

  1. 1. Joyce Meyer Ministries
  2. 2. ESPN
  3. 3. Joel Osteen Ministries
  4. 4. Miami Heat
  5. 5. Breaking News
  6. 6. NBA
  7. 7. CNN Breaking News
  8. 8. Los Angeles Lakers
  9. 9. Chicago Bulls
  10. 10. BBC Breaking News

No surprise that of its top ten (non-celebrity) brands on Twitter, five were sports-related, and ESPN came in at number two.

Track Social has also taken a look ESPN’s Tweets and how they mix it up from the sublime: “He’s 5’9 and DUNKS over anything” to the more offbeat: “What would make for the best #OfficeCombine drill? Reply with the hashtag #OfficeCombine. We’ll RT (retweet) our favorites”.

Americans do love their sport in general and their basketball in particular, which dominates this chart with NBA teams Miami Heat, the Chicago Bulls and the Lakers all there as well as the NBA.  Although the NFL does feature in the best overall social engagement list (below) in the form of the Super Bowl winners the New York Giants and their losing opponents, the New England Patriots.

Breaking news

Three news organisations show up here – Breaking News (an aggregate of many different news feed sources), CNN, and BBC Breaking News. The BBC also features in brands with top social presence as do Fox and Bloomberg (see below).

Lady Gaga, meet Joyce Meyer

This is clearly an American thing. The presence of religion here is an interesting one in the form of the evangelical preaching and publishing organisation of Joyce Meyer Ministries from Missouri.

Catering to a largely female following, the posts (about four to six per day) range from cautionary wisdom: “The sooner you learn that feelings are fickle, the better off you’ll be” to motivational exhortation: “If you’re too busy for God then it’s time to change your schedule.” They also include the occasional Bible verse and update on where Joyce will be appearing next.

Given the lack of proprietary content coming through her feed (there’s nothing particularly exclusive about the Psalms), the success of Meyers’ Twitter strategy tells us something about the attraction of social media platforms like Twitter. The real power of this technology is to allow a personality (who would otherwise never be able to engage with one of “the masses”) to speak directly into a person’s daily life.