Vitrue, a social media marketing company with offices in New York and Atlanta, released a list of the top 20 automotive brands in the social media world, to tout its free Social Media Index online metric. Compiled using a tool that measures the online conversations involving a brand from a variety of popular social media sites, the list follows a January ranking of the top social overall brands of 2008.
Launched in October, the free social media tool (SMI) works by sending out an algorithm once a day that measures the number of mentions a certain word or phrase gets in social media sites and divides them into five categories: social networking, video sharing, picture sharing, microblogs and blogs. Companies can understand winners and losers, the impacts of programs and various marketing activities by entering their brand (or branded product) and a rival brand to see how they stack up, both overall or in the five individual categories. It does not measure the sentiment of the comments.
Vitrue’s clients can look at their brands performance in the social media world and design their marketing strategies accordingly. ‘A media buyer can use [the information provided by the tool] to start to tactically develop programs that can bolster their brand’s presence against their competitive set,’ says Bradford.
