Ornico and Fuseware launch Africa Brand Index

Brand intelligence company, Ornico, has announced the results of the first Africa Brand Index powered by Fuseware. A benchmark that ranks some 500 of Africa's top brands in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya according to social media performance, the top five brands monitored and analysed for the month of July 2015 included Supersport in first place, The Expresso Show (second), Idols South Africa (third), Woolworths (fourth) and Vodacom (fifth).

Created by Ornico and powered by Fuseware, the Africa Brand Index has created a new social media currency for benchmarking reach and engagement. The research tool examines reach, brand growth, and social media user sentiment about brands on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. It also measures community engagement with branded content.

The current geography for the benchmarking tool is South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. Each month the Africa Brand Index will release a revised index of the top brands according to social media performance at africabrandindex.com.

The Africa Brand Index will also enable people to search industries - such as media, retail, auto, and others - to determine top brands in each sector. A search for the top brands in each of the countries surveyed, namely South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, can be performed.

The Africa Brand Index enables brand managers and their agencies to benchmark and assess reach, frequency and sentiment at the end of a brand campaign. Traditionally public relations agencies have used Advertising Value Equivalent and other metrics as post campaign measures to analyse brand return on investment. Ornico's Africa Brand Index now affords agencies and brand managers a tool to determine a "currency" for social media reach and engagement.

"To create Ornico's Africa Brand Index we pre-selected over 500 of Africa's top brands and measured their performance on social media's big four, which of course are Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook," said Ornico's CEO, Oresti Patricios. "These first results clearly show how effective media brands are in terms of leveraging social media, and it came as no surprise that Supersport was at the top of the league," he added.

"The methodology we used was to rank brands according to social media growth, as well as the brands' engagement on each of the social media. We also analysed how timeously and well brands responded to comments or user entries on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube," Patricios said.

The four key criteria for measuring social media performance on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube was weighted as follows:

Growth. Ornico selected growth as a key criteria to measure social media performance, because this connotes popularity and the adoption of a brand's service on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube. "Growth obviously indicates performance whereas stasis or a negative growth indicates a lack of social media performance," said Patricios, who added: "In terms of weighting, growth contributed some 30% in weighting to the Africa Brand Index overall score."

Engagement. To assess performance, Ornico determined how active or involved community members are on a brand's Facebook page, YouTube account, Twitter service or Instagram account. "Engagement with branded content is a critical measure of social media success because content can be relevant and a real drawcard, or 'wallpaper' that's simply ignored," Patricios explained. Engagement contributed 35% to the Africa Brand Index score for social media performance.

Response. "Responsiveness is critical to growing fans or followers, or to building community, which is why this was a key measure for the Africa Brand Index," says Patricios. User engagement contributed a 20% weighting to the Africa Brand Index.

Sentiment. "In terms of sentiment we look at how well brands are liked on social media by analysing the favourable mentions of brands," Patricios said. Sentiment contributed 15% in terms of weighting to the overall score for the Africa Brand Index.

Ornico said it envisaged that brand owners and managers, together with marketers, advertising agencies and public relations practitioners, would find the Africa Brand Index useful. "Anyone who is involved with building of brands by growing communities or curating content on the big four will find the index useful and insightful," said Mike Wronski, founder of Fuseware.

Acquired by Ornico in May 2015, Fuseware is a social analytics company that tracks and interprets online media mentions, sentiment and share of voice. "As researchers we've discovered that brand owners and managers have struggled to find a universally agreed metric to measure online performance," Wronski said. "A big problem we've encountered is the measurement of social content online using Advertising Value Equivalents. This is a completely erroneous way of measuring reach, social media performance or representing a return on content investment," Wronski added.

"What's exciting about the Africa Brand Index is that it offers an accurate benchmark that is generated through an algorithm, which means that there isn't any human intervention in arriving at the scores," Wronski said. "Social media increasingly plays a pivotal role in building brands. As digital media make up for a greater part of media consumption, it has become critical to accurately measure social media performance, and to do so in a way that benchmarks reach and engagement. Because of this we're really pleased that we've been able to contribute toward the accurate benchmarking of brands on the big four - Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram," Wronski said.

The top twenty in Ornico's Africa Brand Index, which ranks the social media performance of this continent's top 500 brands:

The big four social media used to create Ornico's Africa Brand Index:

Facebook has 1.49 billion monthly active users [as of June 30, 2015], of which some 1.31 billion were active mobile users. As of June 30, 2015, Facebook's biggest markets are outside of its country of origin. Some 83.1% of Facebook's daily active users are outside the US and Canada.

YouTube has more than 1 billion users. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. People watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views. What's really interesting to note is that half of YouTube's views are via mobile devices.

Twitter has 316 million users, and some 500 million tweets are sent each day. 80% of these tweets are sent via mobile devices.

Instagram is a community of some 300 million who capture and share the world's moments on the service, sharing over 60 million photos every day.