Amazon, Nordstrom, athleisure brands grace TotalSocial top 10 ranking

By

Obi Anyanwu

Published
May 15, 2017

Social media engagement is important to brands for driving sales, strengthening its relationship with customers, developing a good reputation and for staying in conversations. According to Total Social data from Engagement Labs, a company that measures brand performance with respect to social media and word of mouth, conversations about brands are happening offline more than online and those conversations are positive.

 
The company this month released its TotalSocial ranking that found that conversations about retail and apparel brands are mainly face-to-face as opposed to on social media. TotalSocial is a scoring system that measures brands based on the most important drivers of brand performance: volume, sentiment, brand sharing and influence. The rankings are built on Engagement Labs' social media measurement tool and an offline word of mouth tracking system.

Out of the 60 brands, Amazon emerged as the TotalSocial leader in retail and apparel for its offline sentiment and as a ‘Conversation Commander’  for its online brand sharing performance, which includes sharing branded content by consumers on social media. 

Nike took the second place on the TotalSocial ranking, followed by Nordstrom, Victoria’s Secret, Adidas, Under Armour, Ulta Beauty, Costco, Forever 21 and Ikea.
 
Engagement Labs noted the presence of athleisure brands in three of the top six positions, as well as Nordstrom topping the online score, driven by its digital and cross-channel shopping strategy that is designed to appeal to millennials. In addition, Costco had the largest gap in favor of offline conversations versus online.
 
Ed Keller, CEO of Engagement Labs, said, “We know that TotalSocial scores are predictive of future sales, and this strong performance by these athleisure brands helps to explain the double-digit growth for this sector when the rest of the apparel category is seeing very low growth. We will keep a careful eye on the trends, but from what we have seen over the past year, there is plenty of reason to believe that analysts’ projections for continued growth ahead are on the mark.”
 
Brands that missed the top 10 include Old Navy, Home Depot, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, H&M, Best Buy, Air Jordan, and Kohl’s. Old Navy, Home Depot, Target, and Bed Bath & Beyond made the top ten for offline scores, but fell behind for their online scores, and “Social Misfits” H&M, Best Buy, Air Jordan and Kohl’s scores were similar in favor of online scores. 

TotalSocial tracks 500 brands within the U.S. across 17 major industry categories, and 350 brands in the UK.