“You can’t buy anything with followers,” says Adam Brousek, founder and managing director of the Prague agency Hustle, in a sponsored article on CzechCrunch. On 31 August his team launched the Social Pulse benchmark, which ranks Czech brands on Instagram by how effectively they work with their audience. As of 23 September it covered more than twenty sectors. The top spot went to Air Bank with a score of 77.2 points.
Audience engagement carries six times the weight of follower growth
The benchmark rates brands on the Social Efficiency Score, on a scale from 0 to 100. Audience engagement carries 30% of the score, vertical video 20%. Posting regularity, community work and content nativity each account for 15%. Follower growth makes up just 5%.
The weighting model thus rewards brands for vertical video and audience reactions, while largely setting aside the mere growth of fans. The methodology calculates engagement from likes, comments and video views relative to the number of followers, so brands with large but passive audiences are pushed further down. According to the agency's website, a large account is therefore rather at a disadvantage in the calculation.
Maxima Reality second, mobile operators the strongest sector
Behind Air Bank, Maxima Reality finished second with 70.8 points. Third place went to the chain McDonald's ČR with 69.4 points. On the pages of individual sectors, Hustle states that account size and budget make no difference. According to the methodology, only large nationwide consumer brands enter the study.
Of the sectors, the trio of mobile operators did best, with a median of 58.8 points. The lowest median, 27.9 points, belonged to hotel chains as of 23 September. For real estate agencies, Reels-format videos made up a median of 70% of posts, the highest share of any sector. The agency has revised the methodology several times since launch and states for each sector which version was used to measure it.
Agency Hustle measures a market it operates in itself
The benchmark was published by Hustle, which by its own account has managed social media for brands since 2017. On its website it lists Česká spořitelna, KitKat and Pilulka among its clients. So the study is published by a firm that operates in the market it measures. Česká spořitelna, meanwhile, ranks second among banks behind Air Bank with 58.0 points. The methodology also values the type of work the agency offers brands, and the agency's website says that Social Pulse figures steer the work Hustle does for its clients.
Brousek sees the cause of weak brand results in the process by which their content is made. “The problem is not that companies don't know how to make content. It's that it gets made according to strategy and an approval loop, not according to what people on the other side actually care about,” Brousek says in the same article, which CzechCrunch's editorial team prepared in cooperation with Hustle. According to him, audiences are won by content created specifically for the platform and in the language the target group speaks. The benchmark assesses this with a component called content nativity.
With the benchmark, Hustle wants brands to measure success by how many followers the content actually interests. “Without people’s interest, you have nothing,” Brousek sums up.
Comments