Last week in the Brands App
This week, we find out which car brand loves NBA the most, how to tell if your followers really love Justin Beiber’s hair, and what the heck we mean when we tell you that your followers are ‘Daring’ …
As always, we welcome your comments.
The sections this week:
The Intrinsic Value of Having a Baseline
I care about my brand. So much so, that we’re spending a lot (by our standards anyway) of money to revamp it. Everything we have right now has served a purpose, but now its time we took the next step and moved to a unified image, presented to you in a professional, clear manner. Watch this space for more on that.
Anyway, I digress.
As I was saying, I love my brand and I deeply care about the people who encounter it. I want to know what everyone thinks. We’re in a fortunate position that, at our stage, we can still reach out to each new user of our app as an individual, and get direct feedback.
We can do that because we’re small right now. We’re aiming to change that size of course, but not the personal, approachable persona of our brand.
If your brand is Ford, or Coke or American Express, however, getting that level of understanding is much harder to do. We think we can help.
Think about it, as a Whit.li user, Coke can find out a LOT about the people who interact with the brand on Twitter. They can get some understanding of how many of them there are (and of course compare that to their competitors), they can get an idea of the segment split in their follower community (ie. the relative proportions of Daring, Rugged, Reliable, Wholesome and Sophisticated people among their following) and compare that to a competitor brand.
Also, for the following as a whole, or for any particular segment, they can get a great understanding of how interests vary in their segments (and compare to their competitors of course). So, as an example, Coke might discover that their “Daring” followers have “CNN Breaking News” as their top media influence, and that for the “Sophisticated” folks, “Mashable” is the top media influence. … try it for yourself.
Interesting, eh? Daring folks love CNN and Sophisticates love Mashable.
Except it’s most likely wrong!
Without some kind of benchmark, it’s impossible to say whether Coke’s Daring followers really have a deeper affinity for CNN than the population at large, or the population of other Daring folks. It’s perfectly possible that lower down the order there’s another News source that the Coke followers have glommed onto (and their love for it is higher than the the general population)
This is why in the near term, you’ll see the introduction of benchmarks across the Whit.li universe. You’ll be able to understand why Justin Beiber is the top public personality among your followers. Is it because they genuinely, deeply love everything about Justin – his hair, his voice and his clothes? Or, does Justin show up because he’s one of the most popular personalities on Twitter? By benchmarking, you will be able to find out.
Under the Microscope
This week, we’re taking a closer look at two automobile brands: Kia and Nissan.
At the top-level they’re similar in terms of the number of followers in the Twitter world at just over 100,000. But that’s where the similarities end.
An interesting story is revealed when we look at the other brands that their followers are engaged with. It’s clear that Nissan’s followers are ‘car people’ – more so than Kia’s followers, since the top 6 brands that Nissan USA’s followers are engaged with are all automobile brands. Kia’s followers, on the other hand, have automobile brands for 3 of the top 6, the other slots are rounded out with big ‘internet’ brands – YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. You might say that Kia’s followers have wider interests …
There’s a clear division in sports too – Nissan people like NFL, Kia people are NBA fans … in fact, all of the top 6 sports interests of Kia’s followers are NBA related (King James, Dwyane Wade, Shaq & Kevin Durant feature prominently). Nissan followers interests are more diverse: NFL is the top sports interest, but sports personalities which they’re interested in include Shaq, Serena Williams, Travis Pastrana & Kobe Bryant.
The segmented split is interesting too: Both brand’s largest segment is ‘Sophisticated’, but it’s a far heavier slice of the pie for Kia (at 27.1%) v’s Nissan (at 10.4%).
For more, check out how your own favorite car brand stacks up against either of these two: brands.whit.li
Now You Know
If you’ve been using the standard Whit.li segmentation, you might be wondering where the segmentation categories come from, and what they mean. The segmentation study originates from Jennifer Aakers (link here).
We picked this study, since it’s generic nature enables us to apply it across most industries. If your company has a specific segmentation model that you’re using, we’d be glad to model it for you, based in social data. Contact us if you want to discuss.
In the meantime, you can learn a bit more about the segment definitions using the chart below.