Which brands most improved their reputations in social media in 2012? And which companies made them worse?

We asked the Dachis Group, a social media measurement agency, to tell us which brands got the biggest increases in consumer love, and which lost the most ground.

Dachis maintains a "Social Business Index," which monitors user sentiment on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Renren, and signals from wikis and blogs. That covers 10 billion social actions and 50 million+ social signals in real-time across 30,000 brands.

We weren't interested in the brands that are the most or least-loved overall. Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines will always be among consumers' top and bottom brands. Rather, we wanted to know which companies got the biggest increase in love — or hate — over the year.

So Dachis measured the amount of "very positive" social media activity from the first three months of 2012 for each brand, and then did the same calculation for the last three months. The result is a ranking of the five companies that gained the most love, and the five that lost the most love.

First, the companies that gained the most consumer love ...

The 5 biggest social media winners of 2012 (next) →

5. Starbucks. Brand love: +26% / Social Business Index Rank: 26

Dachis says: 
Starbucks is a perennial top-performer in social and 2012 was no exception. The company’s social savvy earned it 19 million new fans and followers in 2012 and its push into at-home and on-the-go products gave all those people something fun to talk about. 


4. Adidas. Brand love: +35% / Rank 25

Dachis says: Adidas added more than 34 million new fans and followers in just 12 months this year. The company put that audience to good use and benefited from high levels of positive discussion all year long.


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