BrightEdge Study Finds 70% of Top 200 Brands Fail at Social Media SEO

Majority of Top Brands Do Not Have Facebook or Twitter accounts in Top 20 Search Results on Google

SAN MATEO, Calif – April 18, 2011 – BrightEdge, the world’s first enterprise class SEO platform that helps brands rise above the increasing clutter on the Web, today announced that according to its analysis, the majority of leading consumer brands are investing in social media presence but doing little to optimize Facebook or Twitter pages to make them more discoverable in search results.

BrightEdge reviewed the social media presence of the top 200 brands in the world. It found that close to 100 percent hold the top or near top rank in search results for the brand name. But in these same brand searches, the company found that 70 percent of these brands did not have Facebook or Twitter pages in the top 20 results. Experts say links that are not in the top 10 search results most often do not get clicked on by consumers.

"Brands today are pouring countless resources into social media channels—and are creating great content that will help them engage with consumers," said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. "Optimizing these for SEO purposes is a crucial way to drive exposure. Brands may be missing critical customer connection points if consumers can’t easily discover their social media pages in search."

Of the top 200 brands listed in the Fortune 500, approximately 68 percent had Twitter accounts that were not in the top 20 Google results. And about 71 percent had Facebook pages that did not appear in the top 20 results of a search for the specific brand name.

By analyzing various social media accounts, BrightEdge did not always find a correlation between the number of friends or followers and search rank. For example, the Facebook page of a leading photography equipment brand does not rank in the top 20 search results, despite having more than 160,000 Likes. Conversely, a leading auto manufacturer with only 17,307 fans has a Facebook page that ranks in the top 10 of search results.

BrightEdge also looked at individual verticals and found that retailers are the most successful at optimizing their social media pages. Of the top 23 retailers, 13 have Twitter pages in the top 20 search results. The verticals that are currently least effective at optimizing social media are the finance and insurance industries. Only three of the top 43 financial and insurance companies have Facebook fan pages that rank in the top 20 search results.