Original article : http://www.forbes.com/sites/markfidelman/2013/04/25/10-lessons-from-the-top-25-most-engaged-brands-on-twitter/
How can a 125 year old organization rank among the most engaging social brands? According to Robert Michael Murray Vice President, Social Media of National Geographic, “It’s not the fact that we’re a magazine brand. It’s the fact we’re born out of this idea of being a society. And we bring together people who are like minded around geography, who want to share and distribute knowledge.” In fact, Murray has learned that Twitter can be used to create a community around important scientific discoveries and causes. They use their content to raise the issues and they use Twitter to discuss them.
I do think RT’s are a level of engagement (but not the only measure). For me, an RT can be a hat tip, it can be a “I agree with this tweet” or as many do – they add a short comment after it. But clearly there is a level of engagement in an RT – by definition. You can argue that an RT is a weaker form of an engagement (and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree) but I do think it’s important to capture in a formula for engagement on Twitter.
These companies and the 25 others listed below understand the power of engagement. In order to find them, Nestivity (a client of mine) asked InfiniGraph Co-founder Chase McMichael and Dr. Natalie Petouhoff to conduct the research, “The 30 day analysis is based on the InfiniGraph Engagement Analysis Platform , which compared the average number of re tweets (RT) per post from February 2nd to March 5th 2013, using proprietary algorithms for determining Twitter responses, content trend scores and clicks on links and other content,” McMichael told us.
