Food Network, E! Top Social Media Charts: Study

Food Network is the top-performing network on Facebook while E! again took the crown on Twitter, according to a new study from Engagement Labs that measures social media performance.

And that performance is based on much more than “likes” and re-tweets.

Engagement Labs’s proprietary “eValue” measurement tool calculates a social media score of between 0-100 based on three elements: Engagement (the amount of interaction content receives on specific social networks), Impact (the reach content receives on a social network), and Responsiveness (a measurement of how much and how fast a brand responds to conversations on social media).

Those combined metrics are helpful because a brand with 1 million follows might not necessarily be good at connecting with consumers. “If no one is engaging with your content your content isn’t doing what it should be doing,” Jessica Dell'Aquila, marketing director at Engagement Labs, said.

Engagement Labs, which takes and calculates these scores for a wide range of industries, believes the measurements can provide companies with more insight into the performance of their social media strategies and perhaps expose where they need to do better.

Among some takeaways from the latest study, the firm found that TV networks generally scored well for engagement and impact on  Facebook. While Food Network had the highest overall eValue score, Fox Business scored the highest engagement score, but got a goose egg for Responsiveness. MTV scored highest on Impact, but lower Engagement scores dropped its overall eValue score.

On Twitter, the networks tended to earn high Impact scores and stronger Responsiveness on that platform, given its natural real-time, two-way communication conduit. On Twitter, E! ranked first in Engagement, followed by  Fox News, while MTV had the top Responsiveness score.

Viewed through the Engagement Labs lens, the top 10 on Facebook were: Food Network, MSNBC, Fox News, HGTV, Fox Business, Logo TV, Golf Channel, PBS, CNBC and NFL Network. The bottom ten: NBC, Sundance TV, Fox, A&E, Spike, ION Television, E!, The CW, ABC, Oxygen and truTV.

On Twitter, the top ten were: E!, Fox News, Cartoon Network, ESPN, MTV, Hallmark Channel, Freeform, CNN, Golf Channel and NFL Network. The bottom ten: ABC, TV Land, National Geographic Channel, TLC, ION Television, BET, TBS, Syfy, C-SPAN, NBC and Cooking Channel.

In last year’s study, MSNBC scored highest on Facebook, while E! was tops on Twitter.

The study also looked at the top OTT SVOD services. On Facebook, Hulu outranked Amazon and Netflix. On Twitter, Amazon was tops, followed by Netflix and Hulu.