Lenovo, Nintendo, Samsung and Intel Reign Supreme on the Social Landscape, Finds New Brandwatch Consumer Technology Report

Findings demonstrate the benefits of social listening for consumer tech brands

NEW YORK, July 7, 2016 – Brandwatch, the leading social intelligence company, today released its Consumer Technology report featuring social analysis and insights drawn from the examination of 50 major consumer electronics brands. The report emphasized the value of listening to consumer voices on social in order for brands to keep pace with innovations in its ever-evolving industry. Additionally, the findings ranked Lenovo, Nintendo, Samsung Electronics and Intel as the consumer technology industry’s leading social brands. For the full Brandwatch report, please visit: https://www.brandwatch.com/reports/consumer-technology/.

Brandwatch’s analysis found that, on Twitter, consumers dominate social conversation in the consumer tech space – with 95 percent of tweets coming from audience accounts. While consumers may drive the bulk of social conversation, they are also more apt to share content produced by brands on Twitter. For example, on average, consumer electronics brands’ content is retweeted by audience members 123 times daily. Those retweets comprise a quarter of the entire Twitter conversation. For reference, the retail industry only gets 65 retweets daily and the telecommunications industry just 59. On Facebook, shares are also high for the consumer tech industry with 126 shares daily. This large volume of social shares not only indicates that consumer tech branded content is generally well received, but also shows strong willingness from the consumer tech audience to share branded content.

Conversations mentioning the top five mobile brands (Apple, HTC, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung) showed that Apple is king, accounting for over 50 percent of the conversation and HTC following with around 30 percent of mentions. Conversely, within the computer sector, Microsoft came in first, owning 29 percent of the conversation among the top five brands (Microsoft, Apple, HP, Dell, Logitech). Apple followed closely with 26 percent share of conversation (much of which can be attributed to mentions directed at Apple’s Twitter channel customer support).

Social media proves a critical space for tech brands to communicate news, maintain brand image, and address customer inquiries. The analysis between brand and audience exposes the effectiveness of the social strategy and offers insight into areas for improvement. For example, when analyzing mentions of audio devices, Brandwatch’s study found the most talked about topics were wireless and bluetooth capabilities indicating the importance of remote speakers/headphones to their consumer base. Similarly, social conversation around VR and gaming technologies were the source for many complaints about lack of compatibility between VR brands and their associated video games. Both of these examples demonstrate the value of social listening for honing innovation and product features to meet consumer expectations.

Additional key findings include:

Lenovo, Nintendo, Samsung Electronics, and Intel all scored highest in overall score, while Jawbone, Nikon and Philips scored lowest.
GE Appliances ranked highest in social engagement with a score of 100.
Very new product sectors like drone tech and virtual reality are still in constant state of flux, with brands leaders changing as a result of campaigns and events.
The most common adjectives used to describe consumer technology brands are “cool” and “innovative”, with interesting variations by product sub-sectors.
In general, audiences of leading consumer technology brands skew heavily male.

“Technology changes, adapts and gets replaced at a rate unlike many other industries. With consumer technology brands, staying ahead-of-the-game means successfully keeping up with these changes,” said Alex Jones, content researcher at Brandwatch. “Tech companies must utilize the most innovative technologies available to best understand their markets and give brands the competitive edge in an industry where daily innovation is commonplace.”

Methodology:

The report was created by examining 5,547,802 online conversations across Twitter, Facebook, news sites, blogs, and forums from April 1 – June 16, 2016. Brandwatch measured electronic brands across five categories: social visibility, general visibility, net sentiment, reach growth, and social engagement and content. It featured 50 brands including Microsoft, Intel, Nintendo and Samsung Electronics.

Download the full report https://www.brandwatch.com/reports/consumer-technology/.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s leading social intelligence company. Brandwatch Analytics and Vizia products fuel smarter decision making around the world.

The Brandwatch Analytics platform gathers millions of online conversations every day and provides users with the tools to analyze them, empowering the world’s most admired brands and agencies to make insightful, data-driven business decisions. Vizia distributes visually-engaging insights to the physical places where the action happens.

The Brandwatch platform is used by over 1,200 brands and agencies, including Cisco, Whirlpool, British Airways, Sony Music, and Dell. Brandwatch continues on its impressive business trajectory, recently named a global leader in enterprise social listening platforms by the latest reports from several independent research firms. Increasing its worldwide presence, the company has offices around the world including Brighton, New York, San Francisco, Berlin and Singapore.

Brandwatch. Now You Know.