Sports Properties Dominate Shareablee Top 25 Social U.S. Brands Rankings

Social media analysis firm Shareablee released the Top 25 Social U.S. Brands in 2014 with the NBA, NFL, MLS, and WWE holding four of the top six spots. The ranking reflects a growth of 108% in social engagement and a total of 42 billion social actions in 2014 (25B on Facebook, 2B on Twitter, 15B on Instagram).

Sports Leagues dominate the social rankings capturing 15% of all social interactions in 2014. While National Geographic dominates the Top 25 ranking with 579M total actions (likes, comments, shares, retweets, favorites) across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the NBA ranked second with nearly 420M Total Actions followed by the NFL with nearly 300M, MLB with 253M+, Men’s Humor with 235M+, and WWE with 195M+. Sports publisher Bleacher Report is the leading U.S. brand on Twitter with 12.7M engaged actions.

National Geographic also ranked number one on Instagram. Of the Top Ten, Men’s Humor ranked number one on Facebook with 224M total actions and 396% growth.

ⁱ Total actions metric includes the total volume of post-level likes, shares, favorites, retweets and comments.
ⁱⁱ Total content includes all posts, tweets and media posted by each brand across platforms.
ⁱⁱⁱ Actions per post metric notes the average number of actions garnered by each brand.
^iv Total fans/followers includes fans/followers for all properties under each brand as of December 31, 2014.

“The social media marketplace saw huge shifts in 2014, with many brands moving towards measuring audience impressions, clicks, and thinking cross-platform,” Shareablee CEO and Founder Tania Yuki said. “Video is the biggest opportunity, growing 147 percent in 2014, with Twitter Video in particular showing massive engagement growth at 963 percent. We also saw huge enthusiasm for social click-throughs this past year with some social native publishers seeing up to 425 percent growth in referral traffic.”

Other notable findings include:

• The Top 5 Brands on Facebook: Men’s Humor (224M actions), Fox News (150M actions), NBA (138.5M actions), WWE (135.9M actions), The Huffington Post (113.6M actions)
• The Top 5 Brands on Twitter: Bleacher Report (12.7M actions), NFL (12.6M actions), Men’s Humor (11.3M actions), E! Online(10.2M actions), NBA (9.9M actions)
• The Top 5 Brands on Instagram: National Geographic (519.3M actions), NBA (271.6M actions), MLB (218.1M actions), NFL(204.1M actions), Brandy Melville (130.5M actions)
• Media Publishing captured the largest share of voice at 31%, followed by TV and Sports, each at 23%, and Retail, 15%.