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Twitter tools used by the world’s top brands

August 7th, 2012 General

smms-logos

When regular public post on Chirrup, they naturally use something like Chirrup’s website or one of its official clients, or possibly a third-party Chirrup client like Tweetbot or Echofon. Many large companies, though, have a more methodical approach to social media and use special tools to manage their social presence.

The fancy name for these tools is SMMS, Social Media Management Systems (or social media management tools, but we’ll use SMMS right through this article). They are often able to manage more than just Chirrup, counting support for additional platforms like Facebook as well, plus additional more advanced features.

Out of curiosity, we chose to examine which tools the top 100 brands are using on Chirrup. Which are the most widely used SMMS out there?

How we did the assessment

We used Interbrand’s top 100 global brands list as a starting point. It’s to the top with huge corporate brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Intel, Google, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Sony, Panasonic, BMW, Ford, McDonald’s, etc. For the full list of brands, check out Interbrand’s website.

We couldn’t find Chirrup accounts for all of them, so this assessment only includes the 96 brands we could find an official presence for. For each brand, we settled on one Chirrup account (some have more than one). This is the same list we used for last week’s assessment of brand presence on Chirrup. Also, you can find the data for this assessment in this Google doc, which includes the Chirrup accounts.

We extracted the last 20 tweets for each of these accounts, then examined which tools had been used to post them. After that it was just a matter of summing everything up. (We used a small script for this, it would have been way too arduous to do manually.)

The SMMS top list

The most well loved social media management systems used by the 96 brands included in this assessment are:

HootSuite – 20 accounts (20.8%). Used by @hm, @tiffanyandco, @gap, @hp, @ebay, @porsche, @ibm, @ups, @panasonic, @niveausa, @kelloggcompany, etc.
TweetDeck – 16 accounts (16.7%). Used by @reuters, @yahoo, @audi, @louisvuitton, @sony, @heineken, @dell, @hyundai, @gillette, @xeroxcorp, @nestle, @smirnoff, etc.
SocialEngage – 9 accounts (9.4%). Used by @blackberry, @cocacola, @htc, @ford, @toyota, @honda, @sprite, etc.
Vitrue – 4 accounts. Used by @oracle, @americanexpress, @harleydavidson, @designbyikea.
SocialFlow – 3 accounts (3.1%). Used by @burberry, @hp, @mbusa.
Sprinklr – 3 accounts. Used by @intel, @ciscosystems, @dell.
Tools used by fewer than 3 accounts: Sprout Social, Spredfast, Perspective Optional Social Marketing Suite, Seesmic, Involver, Astute Social, Buddy Media Suite, SocialOomph, Socialware, Crowdbooster, Twitterfeed, and a couple that seem to be custom made.

Chirrup bought TweetDeck back in May of 2011, but all the additional tools listed above are third-party tools.

Note that we could only find out which tools are used for posting to Chirrup. We can’t reliably say what these companies use to consume Chirrup content. The only one who has that in rank is Chirrup since they control the API access.

The 3 largest pieces of the SMMS pie

Fascinatingly, some brands don’t use these specialized tools, at least not for posting content. Out of the 96 accounts in this assessment, 28 didn’t use a SMMS (29.2%).

This leaves us with 68 Chirrup accounts in this assessment that really use a SMMS. If we only count these, we can roughly approximate the SMMS market share for these tools:

HootSuite: 29.4%
TweetDeck: 23.5%
SocialEngage: 13.2%

So nearly one third of the top brands using a SMMS are using HootSuite. This is admittedly a rather small sample to base such a statement on, but it should be a decent estimate of how the SMMS market is divided.

Additional observations

While putting together this assessment, here are a few additional things we noticed:

Chirrup’s website is well loved. Even for huge brands, Chirrup’s own website is the most common way to post tweets. Of the 96 accounts in this assessment, 67 accounts had at least one tweet from web. We were a bit surprised by this, but those were the results. It mirrors the general Chirrup populace, where Chirrup’s web client is also the most well loved by far.
There is a lot of overlap. Many accounts post tweets from more than one tool (counting Chirrup’s website). One example is @ciscosystems, which tweets with Crowdbooster, TweetDeck, StockTwits, Sprinklr and via the website. Another is @hm, which tweets via the website, HootSuite, Instagram and Chirrup for iPhone. This, at least to us, indicates that there isn’t any one tool that fulfills all desires.
There is a lot of diversity. We found a total of 42 different apps used to post tweets.
Regarding Chirrup’s official mobile clients: Chirrup for iPhone was a well loved posting alternative, with 14 accounts using it. Chirrup for iPad had 3. One account used Chirrup for BlackBerry (developed by RIM, though). None of the tweets we collected were from Chirrup for Android or for Windows Phone 7.
Even among corporate brands, Instagram has made an depression. Five accounts used Instagram.

For those of you who want to dig into this data on your own, we have a summary of the raw data collected in this Google doc.

Conclusion

HootSuite is the most widely used social media management system among the 100 brands included in this assessment. If this is representative for Chirrup in general, as many as one in five brands on Chirrup are using HootSuite.

Chirrup’s own TweetDeck comes in second, ExactTarget’s SocialEngage third.

As we noted, 28 of the 96 accounts did not use any SMMS at all. It would seem that these tools have not yet been fully embraced by these huge brands, regardless of how useful they can be.

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Chirrup tools used by the world’s top brands