Twitter and Facebook Insurance Index – Latest Rankings

As we reach the year-end, the love affair between insurance companies and Twitter, which started strongly in the late spring, gained full speed through the summer heat could be on the wane as the temperatures drop. Life insurance companies have, by and large, ignored customer service as an application and focused on marketing and brand awareness. Follower counts continued to be impressive but trailing Facebook fans by an increasing amount and it is unclear where Twitter falls in the strategic plans insurers.

At the end of the year, the leader in Twitter followers is USAA with over 7500, an increase in the past 3 months of 25%. While this increase seems impressive, it is a long way off the 18-20% per month we saw in the spring to summer period. Consider this follower count against the same company’s Facebook fan base which now stands at 43000; a 56% increase over the same period.

Life insurance companies are more constrained than other industries by state and federal regulations in what they can say to customers, which is driving the focus to marketing. Twitter was used to promote sporting events such as NASCAR, Baseball and golf by State Farm, Nationwide, The Hartford and these are clearly curtailed in the winter months, which might leave a hole in content. Auto insurers have been more aggressive reaching out to customers; Progressive leads the way with an estimated 1000 customer situations handled, or at least started each month with Twitter. Progressive see Twitter as a great way to communicate to customers especially using mobile devices during natural disasters  when desktop computers and landlines might be down.

USAA, State Farm, Allstate and Progressive recruited the most Twitter followers in the past 3 months with honorable mention going to GEICO who went from zero to 400 followers in the period.

Twitter Follower Count

Company         

Company	Followers	3 month change
USAA	7560	25%
State Farm Insurance	4434	38%
Aflac	3704	26%
Allstate	3152	46%
Progressive Insurance	2673	77%
Nationwide	1866	24%
Esurance	819	36%
Chubb	782	500%
The Hartford	729	84%
Liberty Mutual	630	94%
NorthWestern Mutual	554	56%
AXA	537	30%
Thrivent Financial	494	71%
Geico	442	1200%
Travelers Insurance	272	56%
Unum	262	23%
American Family	255	31%
Ameriprise	238	44%
Genworth	194	88%
Western National	161	40%
Amica Mutual	144	157%
Westfield Insurance	142	446%
Farmers Insurance	76	117%

 Facebook Fans

Looking at Facebook, the leaders in fan recruitment over the past 3 months were USAA, Allstate and American Family. Allstate are the clear Facebook winners moving from 1300 to 14,000 fans in the period as part of a strong consolidated social media campaign. American Family recently announced a plan to use Facebook as a strategic marketing vehicle as they increase their fan base from 3500 to 6200 and we expect continued growth.

The latest Facebook fan status is as follows:

Company	Fans	3 month increase
USAA	43158	56%
Allstate	13898	903%
Geico	8090	39%
State Farm Insurance	6555	76%
American Family	6187	75%
Progressive Insurance	5527	22%
Nationwide	2834	59%
AFLAC	2257	50%
ProgressiveMotorcycle	1977	0%
Thrivent Financial	1905	140%
Liberty Mutual	1287	1739%
The Hartford	1067	167%
Principal	773	14%
Westfield Insurance	632	40%
Esurance	546	52%
Travelers Insurance	504	83%
Mutual of Omaha	258	235%
Amica Mutual	207	68%
NewYorkLife	203	577%
Pacific Life	140	218%

 

Twitter Activity

In the introduction, it was suggested that the love affair between insurers and Twitter is waning. This is not because of follower count but from an analysis of the ‘tweets’ sent by insurers. Twitter is a transient medium and it is vital to send regular messages to followers. Despite more insurers now using Twitter, the total activity from all companies became static and is now showing signs of decreasing. Comparing November tweets to August tweets, 9 of the top 10 companies by follower count had reduced activity levels. Only auto insurers showed positive activity levels. This activity is driven by customer service outreach and we do not expect these levels to decrease.

  

Is the Twitter Appeal Dropping for Insurers?

Is Twitter losing its excitement for the insurance industry or has it become just one task too many in a busy day. Twitter does require a lot of time and effort, it needs to be monitored, and you need to think about what the objective of the next ‘tweet’ might be; to direct traffic to the blog, to the website, to help drive up follower count? In the last measurement period, the number of tweets posted by insurance company tweeters fell for the first time since we started measuring. This has not stopped the growth in followers; the increase is still impressive. But why this drop in activity at a time of the year when you might expect the opposite? In some companies we spoke to, a busy September for marketing personnel just took time away from twitter. In other companies, it was the maturity of social media causing the slow down, more people wanting to understand the strategy – the too many cooks syndrome. In at least 2 companies they had simply got bored of Twitter. Facebook was a contributor to the decline, it has taken on a bigger role in many insurers and that is beginning to impact the Twitter effort. Facebook is a true outpost, a presence, an opportunity to drive marketing and generate referrals from growing fan bases. As an overly generalized comment, Facebook is better for marketing and Twitter is better for outreach customer service.

Key Findings

• Month over month since last period
• Follower count for insurance companies up 21 percent
• All tweet meesages sent by insurers down 9 percent
• Number of promotional messages sent by the group down by 11 percent
• Number of customer service tweets remains constant
• The number of message hits (promotional message times follower count) down by 5 percent

Follower Count

Follower count is simple to measure and indicates the degree that twitter is built into other customer touchpoints.

Company	Follower Count	Increase since last month
USAA	6805	13%
State Farm Insurance	3921	22%
Aflac	3375	14%
Allstate	2700	25%
Progressive Insurance	2191	45%
Nationwide	1670	11%
Esurance	731	21%
The Hartford	535	35%
Liberty Mutual	490	51%
NorthWestern Mutual	467	32%
Thrivent Financial	411	42%
Unum	233	9%
Travelers Insurance	222	28%
American Family	208	7%
Western National	130	13%
Amica Mutual	101	80%
Westfield Insurance	68	162%

Key Findings

• USAA continue to drive follower count but groweth rate slows down
• Progressive continues to show highest percentage follower growth for providers with greater than 1000 followers. Strong customer following
• State Farm and AllState add ‘Twitter Follow Me’ link on website home pages and maintain an impressive follower growth rate
• Liberty Mutual continue strong follower count growth into second month of activity, breaks into top 10

Marketing Reach

Marketing Reach is calculated by multiplying the promotional messages by the number of followers for each message. One on one messages, as common in customer interaction have little impact but a message sent to all followers scores high.

Company	Marketing Reach	Increased since last month
State Farm Insurance	305320	1%
Allstate	212220	46%
Nationwide	171891	-37%
USAA	164899	-39%
Aflac	121095	0%
Progressive Insurance	84555	3%
Esurance	50147	296%
Liberty Mutual	27724	17%
The Hartford	12966	21%
Thrivent Financial	9453	42%
NorthWestern Mutual	1868	32%
Western National	1590	-39%
Amica Mutual	1343	29%
American Family	1292
Westfield Insurance	884	325%
Travelers Insurance	559	-5%
Unum	449	-26%

Key Findings

• State Farm, USAA and Nationwide all drop message count affecting marketing reach
• AllState drops message count only slightly but high follower growth compensates
• American Family revived Twitter activity after a 4 month break
• Esurance introduces esurancecares to handle customer service issues so more tweets from the original id are now promotional

 

Customer Interaction

Customer Interaction is measured by looking at the number of messages directed to a single or named people. These are, to the most part, responding to incoming messages or outreach to people making comments about the company on Twitter.

Company	Percentage of interactive tweets
Progressive Insurance	73%
Allstate	40%
State Farm Insurance	38%
Travelers Insurance	37%
The Hartford	35%
Liberty Mutual	31%
American Family	31%
Amica Mutual	30%
Esurance	30%
Aflac	22%
USAA	7%
Western National	6%
Nationwide	6%
Unum	4%
NorthWestern Mutual	0%
Thrivent Financial	0%
Westfield Insurance	0%

Key Findings

• Progressive continue to focus on customer and propect outreach with impressive 73 percent interactive ratio
• Esurance drops (from 50% to 30%) following introduction of esurancecares
• AllState and StateFarm maintain high interaction numbers with constant message rates
• USAA and Nationwide, despite having high follower counts, resist significant interaction

Latest Insurance Industry Twitter Index – USAA has most fans; Progressive leads in Customer Service

The Customer Respect Group Insurance Twitter review for August shows continued ‘follower’ growth by the active insurance companies. The most active 16 companies added 3,000 followers during the month for a combined follower base of nearly 20,000.

Liberty Mutual and Westfield Insurance made their Twitter debuts during the month, Amica updated their corporate image and esurance commenced their migration to offer full customer service with the name ‘esurnacecares’. American Family went in the other direction and have now all but ceased activity on Twitter.

Liberty Mutual came out swinging, posting 99 messages, many pointing to its corporate blog (http://www.responsibilityproject.com), and increased the follower count from 44 to 324. Westfield Insurance rolled out a more conservative launch, creating a corporate identity but not aggressively adding followers. The Hartford, which came out of the gate fast in July, had a more steady second month consolidating their position. Western National had a brief recruitment campaign during the month announcing Follower Appreciation Week with a $100 prize. The campaign was not overly successful moving followers from 92 to 115.

Insurance Provider Follower Table

Company	Followers	Prev Rank
USAA	6032	1
State Farm Insurance	3218	2
Aflac	2949	3
Allstate	2165	4
Progressive Insurance	1514	6
Nationwide	1507	5
Esurance	602	7
The Hartford	396	9
NorthWestern Mutual	354	8
Liberty Mutual	324	new
Thrivent Financial	289	10
Unum	213	11
Travelers Insurance	174	12
Western National	115	13
Amica Mutual	56	14

Follower growth in the insurance industry remains extremely impressive with an average 18% month-increase on-month increase. USAA, with the largest number of followers, not surprisingly lead the increase, adding almost 700 to end the month at 6032. Progressive moved up one place from 6^th to 5^th by increasing their count 31% since July. Twitter followers are attracted by interesting content and the majority of ‘tweets’ link to blog articles, video and competitions. The question is what does a company do with it’s followers. To retain and grow the audience, new content is needed and not just product news which can lead to increasing pressure to generate new material.

The Conversation Index

When companies announce themselves on Twitter with a logo and corporate messages, customers, prospects and others will see this as an invitation to engage. Social Media is interactive and many companies do not consider that fact in terms of cost, time and implications and must withdraw, as seems to be the case with American Family.

The degree to which a company broadcasts or engages, the Conversation Index, can be estimated by reviewing the number of messages specifically directed at a single person. This does include private messages but what twitter calls “@replies”. These @replies are public but not seen by the vast majority of followers. These messages can be eliminated to estimate “marketing reach” and used to estimate conversations. ‘@replies’ are, to the most part, a response to a questions or a pro-active reach out to people who have mentioned the company’s brand on twitter.  There are many tools that can monitor twitter messages to search for brand mentions. Responses on twitter falls between PR and brand monitoring and customer service which has blurred the lines of responsibility internally for many companies.

 The Conversation index for the top companies is as follows:

Company	Conversation Index
Progressive Insurance	70%
Esurance	49%
Allstate	43%
State Farm Insurance	38%
The Hartford	35%
Liberty Mutual	31%
Travelers Insurance	31%
Aflac	27%
Amica Mutual	25%
USAA	7%
Western National	6%
Nationwide	6%
Unum	4%
NorthWestern Mutual	0%
Thrivent Financial	0%
Westfield Insurance	0%

Progressive are clear ‘conversation’ leaders pro-actively reaching out to customers that express concerns about policies with messages such as:

“We’d like to review your policy with you. Your business is important to us. Contact us at 877-656-0914 or http://bit.ly/RO5o0”

Esurance, second to Progressive, have a very active and again proactive customer service model and have started to mature the process by introducing a new twitter id – esurancecares to separate brand management and service. Customer Service on twitter can introduce an alternative service channel, which can be hard to integrate with traditional CRM systems. During initially twitter activity, monitoring is often conducted by relatively senior personnel but this is not a scalable solution.

Allstate and State Farm continue to mix conversations and service with content promotion.

At the other end of the spectrum, Northwestern, Thrivent and Westfield are using twitter as a traditional news and announcement channel but with more limited follower counts, they have yet to confront the issue to date. Nationwide mostly promote NASCAR events, tweeting on Fridays and Saturdays and the followers may not be focused on product needs.

USAA is the company that jumps out – they have over 6000 followers but they are largely focused on a one way broadcast model and have, to date avoided conversations. USAA also have a very active PR department on Twitter.

Marketing Reach

Marketing reach is calculated by multiplying the number of messages sent to the entire follower base by the number of followers at that time.

Company	Marketing reach
State Farm Insurance	298,309
USAA	281,091
Nationwide	280,343
Aflac	120,885
Allstate	117,637
Progressive Insurance	76,504
Liberty Mutual	22,132
The Hartford	9,856
Esurance	7,311
Thrivent Financial	6,647
Western National	2,704
NorthWestern Mutual	1,416
Amica Mutual	972
Unum	615
Travelers Insurance	601
Westfield Insurance	208

 Reach continues to increase, in part due to the 18% increase in followers, but the number of messages sent out in August was roughly in line with the total in July. State Farm, Allstate and The Hartford reduce their message count in August . Social media, and especially Twitter, is conducted by a very limited number of people internally. Vacations, weekends and other distractions will cause these output drops. Another factor is that Twitter is not about the 140 characters. There is little an insurance company can say in 140 characters and the majority of tweets point to interesting content that will engage followers. Soem of the recent industry ‘tweets’  are:

• Do you know the signs of a market recovery? Really? http://bit.ly/XK9UB – The Hartford
• USAA Ranks #1 on Military Spouse Magazine’s List of Military Spouse friendly employers. http://budurl.com/spouse – USAA
• Video Lesson (download & save just in case) How to Jumpstart a Battery http://bit.ly/sMxko – Allstate
• Love our Blink-182 concert sponsorship? Vote for Blink-182/State Farm in Billboard’s 2009 contest: http://tr.im/ygJA Thanks! #fb – State Farm

A steady stream of content can be expensive to produce which is a hidden cost of twitter engagement.

USAA add 700 followers, maintains Insurance Twitter lead; top 20 insurers add 3000 followers in July

 

The July Insurance Twitter Index makes for interesting reading albeit we are just in the second month of recording statistics and we see wild early swings as company strategies evolve. Twitter continues to be a work in progress for many companies as they attempt to work out where it fits into the corporate objectives. Having said that, and despite a twitter cull of  dubious followers in the month, the industry posted impressive growth. In the past month, having spoken to many companies in the industry, and the legal departments must be working overtime; banning twitter, demanding guidelines and worrying about the implications, the growth of Twitter is proving too fast to ignore and while we may well see a few ‘teething problems’ before things settle down, expect most carriers to engage by year end. Adding followers to the twitter and facebook pages now provides for a new marketing mechanism to promote content, products and services. Twitter is also being used to support customers and facilitate additional dialog. In other industries, we now see very aggressive Follower-Recruitment activity in play. United Airlines promote ‘Twares’ (cheap flights only to Twitter followers), American Airlines are running competitions to drive new fans to its Facebook page.  Western National Insurance have ‘fan appreciation week’ to encourage ‘retweets’ by offering prizes. As Western are starting from a very low base (90 followers), we’ll monitor the results to see how this plan works – in the first day, they added 11 followers.

Twitter Followers

As for follower recruitment in the insurance industry, the key findings are:

• USAA continues to aggressively add followers with 733 additions in July to further increase their lead. They now have 5352 (16% percent month on month increase).
• State Farm and Allstate add 419 and 403 for totals of 2821 and 1817. Allstate’s increase of 31% leads the major twitter players.
• Progressive increased followers by 30% (269 additions) to reach 1156 for July.
• The top newcomer in follower ‘adds’ was The Hartford that started from just 56 to end at 289 at the end of the month.
• The top 20 Insurance tweeters added almost 3000 followers in July.

The top insurance companies for July for Twitter followers are:

Company	Followers	Adds	Growth Rate (month to month)	Previous Rank
USAA	5352	733	16%	1
State Farm Insurance	2821	419	17%	2
Aflac	2471	403	19%	3
Allstate	1817	427	31%	4
Nationwide	1344	187	16%	5
Progressive Insurance	1156	269	30%	6
Esurance	529	54	11%	7
AXA	377	45	14%	8
NorthWestern Mutual	311	60	24%	9
The Hartford	289	233	416%	17
Thrivent Financial	226	60	36%	12
Unum	201	5	3%	10
American Family	179	8	5%	11
Travelers Insurance	154	22	17%	13
Ameriprise	144	17	13%	14

 

Twitter Activity

As for Twitter activity, there are also interesting statistics to look at. USAA is never the most active tweeter and July was a weak month for the company with just 25 messages. This may be due to vacation and if so, illustrates the relative immaturity of the medium. State Farm led the way and pushed out 181 messages during the month. Newcomers to watch going forward as we start to see markedly increased activity levels are:

• Liberty Mutual
• Amica Mutual
• Thrivent
• The Hartford

 

Liberty Mutual has updated their Twitter page from a non-branded to a fully branded presence with links to the main website and to their blog.  

The most active ‘tweeters’ in July were:

State Farm Insurance

Progressive Insurance

Nationwide

Allstate

The Hartford

Aflac

Esurance

USAA

Thrivent Financial

 

Maximum Twitter Reach

The role of Twitter can be problematic, as to its function and goals and we see some companies increasing activity of type of activity while others go in the opposite direction. American Family had, in the first quarter, a very active account, which has now dropped to virtually nothing.

Combining the follower count and the activity levels provides a measure of monthly reach. This does not help understand quality, message or success but can help understand the trends. The July reach leaders were:

 

Company	July Reach	Month on month change
State Farm Insurance	510601	+47%
Allstate	252563	+139%
Nationwide	198912	+28%
Progressive Insurance	175712	+100%
USAA	133800	-38%
Aflac	123550	+7%
Esurance	22218	+14%
The Hartford	21964	+2351%
Thrivent Financial	4972	+1398%
NorthWestern Mutual	2488	-24%

 

As can be seen in the above table, these statistics have wild elements before we start to see stability. The Hartford has the highest growth in reach and this illustrates a new focus so one to watch. State Farm combines a strong following with an aggressive message count to lead the way.

 What Twitter Activity?

Most companies are pushing out news items as well as links to specialist content. Allstate hosts a number of videos on their community site, which they link to continuously. Liberty Mutual, a new entry, is looking to drive traffic to their blog. Nationwide promotes their NASCAR sponsorship heavily, a technique used by many companies including State Farm. Amica has started tweeting more heavily and in a large part are promoting positive consumer reports rankings. Some companies monitor their brand on twitter and interacting with customers. Esurance and Progressive are good examples of companies that proactively reach out to customers who indicate having a problem or question.

One measure of activity-type is determined by reviewing the percentage of ‘@replies messages’. These are messages sent directly to a person, who may or may not be a follower. This is an indicator of the number of conversations.

Twitter Conversation Metric

Company	Percentage of @replies
Progressive Insurance	72%
Esurance	55%
Allstate	50%
The Hartford	36%
Aflac	33%
State Farm Insurance	32%
American Family	31%
Liberty Mutual	31%
Amica Mutual	13%
USAA	8%
Nationwide	7%
Western National	4%
Unum	4%

 

Marketing Tweets

If we look at the reach again but this time eliminate the @replies assuming that the majority of these do not reach the entire audience (but they can), we can calculate a ‘marketing reach’ number, which is looking to drive awareness, traffic and brand, more traditional marketing objectives.

The marketing reach leaders are:

Company	Marketing Reach
State Farm Insurance	347209
Nationwide	184988
Allstate	126282
USAA	123765
Aflac	82779
Progressive Insurance	49199
The Hartford	14057
Esurance	9998
Thrivent Financial	4972
NorthWestern Mutual	2488

 

Allstate, Progressive drop down the table due to their higher reply activity and USAA and Nationwide move up as they are predominately market and engage far less.

 Next month we will review the data again, I expect the leaders to continue to stake their ground but expect Liberty Mutual, Amica, Progressive and The Hartford to become more aggressive. A Facebook insurance study will follow next on this blog as we see similar trends on that platform and many of the same leaders.