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Tweeting The Twitter 12

Last week, I shared with you a report from The Big Money, which came up with a list of some of the world’s top 50 companies using Facebook to their advantage.  After the article was released, the online magazine revealed another list known as the Twitter 12. 

To figure out who would make it on the list, the company asked themselves one main question: Which companies get the most out of Twitter?   The Big Money looked at a number of statistics, such as the number of followers, Twitter growth from September through November, how often and what exactly are these companies tweeting.  The magazine only included companies with more than a million followers.  

Surprisingly only two of the companies mentioned in last week’s Facebook 50 made it onto the Twitter 12.  Trying to figure out the order was not an easy task, but The Big Money noticed a few trends through Twitter which helped them make their decisions. The magazine noted that Twitter is a more effective way to communicate with customers than Facebook is. 

Many companies run their feeds like an emergency hotline. Tweets like this one on one of Dell’s feeds are common: “@kristiewellsHi Kristie. Anything I can help with?” This is the kind of question that a customer service rep would have asked by phone. But the tweets are far more powerful. In @kristiewells’ case, Dell is reaching out to her, implying that her concerns are important. The normal customer service dialogue has been changed; it’s now asynchronous and public. Dell could’ve ignored @kristiewells, but it chose not to. And it chose to tell the whole world that it was trying to help.

This dynamic doesn’t happen on Facebook. There, a company’s fan pages are more of a one-way affair. The company remains the monolith that creates things for others to consume. There is no expectation it will write on your wall if you write on its. Even the vocabulary used—“fan”—implies a one-way relationship, where you’re endorsing their product without any favor in return.

It’s also noted that Media companies dominate the Twitter list, whereas the Facebo0k list had more companies that dealt with food taking over the majority of the spots.  Twitter has become a news ticker of sorts, since Twitter can reach obviously millions of people in just one click.  The New York Times was ranked at the top of the Twitter 12, along with other media companies including E! Entertainment (#2), CNN (#4), BNO News (#6), Health Magazine (#8), and the Silicon Alley Insider, (#10).

You can check the list out at The Big Money’s website.