Brands Consumers Love: Dove, Friskies Top Hootsuite’s Inaugural ‘Love List’

Hoot­suit­e’s Love List is a month­ly report that mea­sures and ranks brands based on social media men­tions, sen­ti­ment, and social con­ver­sa­tions.

Lisa Lacy By Lisa Lacy. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Social media man­age­ment plat­form Hoot­suite has debuted its Love List, a month­ly report that mea­sures how con­sumers react to brands on social by exam­in­ing the con­ver­sa­tions between brands and con­sumers. This report will give brands an oppor­tu­ni­ty to gauge how con­sumers per­ceive them, and improve their score by hav­ing more pos­i­tive con­ver­sa­tions with their audi­ence on social media.


It may sound like a prop from the set of “Mean Girls”, but social media man­age­ment plat­form Hoot­suite has launched The Love List, or what it calls “a recur­ring month­ly report which ranks more than 450 of the world’s top brands on which are see­ing the most love on social media.”

The Love List was cre­at­ed as an “easy-to-under­stand met­ric that could be applied across the entire enter­prise,” accord­ing to Mark Pas­carel­la, the gen­er­al man­ag­er of uberVU via Hoot­suite, which is a lis­ten­ing, social mon­i­tor­ing and advanced ana­lyt­ics prod­uct.

The Love List uses data from uberVU to pull in hun­dreds of mil­lions of pub­licly avail­able social media posts from net­works like Twit­ter, Face­book, Google+, and LinkedIn, as well as about 20 addi­tion­al plat­forms.

It’s that broad-based col­lec­tion of social insight, or what we con­sid­er to be the entire social web – blogs, forums and com­ment sys­tems where peo­ple have social dis­course – that we bring in for a com­plete 360-degree view,” Pas­carel­la said.

Brands are ranked using three data points over the course of a month, includ­ing the total num­ber of brand men­tions, the sen­ti­ment score for the brand, and the per­cent­age of social con­ver­sa­tions about the brand con­tain­ing the word “love.” Each brand is assigned a score between 1 and 100.

The top 10 brands in Octo­ber were:

  1. Dove
  2. Friskies
  3. Kohl’s
  4. Avon
  5. Renais­sance Hotels
  6. The CW
  7. Tri­pAd­vi­sor
  8. West Elm
  9. Twit­ter
  10. Nord­strom

Hoot­suite notes October’s find­ings include a large num­ber of “acces­si­ble” brands like Dove, Kohl’s, Friskies, Avon, and The CW, as well as a num­ber of brands that “strad­dle the line between acces­si­ble and aspi­ra­tional,” such as Nord­strom, Tri­pAd­vi­sor, Renais­sance Hotels, and West Elm.

We had this gut feel going in with­out look­ing at the data that there would be a num­ber of lux­u­ry brands in the top rank­ings, but only one lux­u­ry brand appeared in the top 25, Chanel, and the next [brands like Cap­i­tal Grille and Bergdorf-Good­man] are clus­tered around 100,” Pas­carel­la said. “[The top-ranked brands are] the brands that were able to suc­cess­ful­ly cul­ti­vate a real­ly pas­sion­ate fan base by using inspired or amus­ing cam­paigns or give­aways or contests…as well as [those that have] fans [like] the CW tele­vi­sion net­work that real­ly engage in word of mouth.”

For its part, Hoot­suite says Dove has suc­cess­ful­ly opti­mized its Real Beau­ty cam­paign to gain trac­tion on social, “which is known for encour­ag­ing women to take a pos­i­tive stance on their bod­ies.” Fur­ther, cit­ing a 2014 Pew Study, Hoot­suite says women are the more active gen­der on social media and the Dove cam­paign encour­ages “pos­i­tive social con­ver­sa­tions among this audi­ence” which com­prised 78 per­cent of the con­ver­sa­tions about Dove.

Hoot­suite says it will update the Love List each month, show­cas­ing which brands have moved up or down in rank­ings based on the changes in men­tion vol­ume, sen­ti­ment and social con­ver­sa­tions. Each month’s results will be shared on the Love List web­site and dis­cussed in webi­na­rs. Fur­ther, Pas­carel­la said Hoot­suite sees this as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate an ongo­ing record of insights and trends.

One ben­e­fit to brands is the abil­i­ty to bench­mark their suc­cess against com­peti­tors, accord­ing to Hoot­suite.

The start­ing point was we want­ed to use analy­sis ver­sus just a tal­ly of likes and shares to put togeth­er a mea­sure­ment of how con­sumers are react­ing to brands – not just pop­u­lar­i­ty, but instead a met­ric that mea­sured how con­sumers are react­ing to those brands via social,” Pas­carel­la said. “One of the key ele­ments was the abil­i­ty to look at two-way pub­li­ca­tions. So much in the past has been a col­lec­tion of likes and shares. What we want to get to here is the abil­i­ty to look at both sides of a con­ver­sa­tion and come up with a sin­gle easy-to-under­stand met­ric.”

In the future, Hoot­suite will also look at which brands are win­ning in cer­tain regions and indus­try cat­e­gories, Pas­carel­la said.

Lisa Lacy

Written by Lisa Lacy

Lisa is a senior features writer for Inked. She also previously covered digital marketing for Incisive Media. Her background includes editorial positions at Dow Jones, the Financial Times, the Huffington Post, AOL, Amazon, Hearst, Martha Stewart Living and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

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