Top 10 Twitter Brands 2011, Winners Announced

by Jason Keath

Over a month ago we kicked off nominations for the Top 10 Twitter Brands. We received over 150 nominations and last week narrowed it down to 24 finalists.

We did the same thing earlier this year to put together our list of 2011 Top 10 Corporate Blogs.

The goal of these user nominated awards is to help find best-of-the-best examples of businesses using Twitter for real results.

We reviewed every account nominated and judged them on their engagement/audience metrics. Then our judges graded the finalists subjectively on entertainment, conversion, and engagement. The combined scores, objective and subjective, brought us to our winners today.

Please congratulate all the nominees and the winners on Twitter.

Thanks To Our Judges

We have teamed up with 4 industry thought leaders on Twitter and business as our esteemed judges.

Arik Hanson (@arikhanson) of ACH Communications
Edward Boches (@edwardboches) of Mullen
Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) of UnMarketing.com
Shelly Kramer (@shellykramer) of V3 Integrated Marketing

Disclosure: All judges avoided scoring any brands they have as clients

Some Interesting Stats From The Winners

Starbucks has been tweeting the longest of the winners, since November 29, 2006 – 1848 days
3 brands tied for the highest scores for “entertainment” value by the judges: Pepsi, Red Cross, Southwest
The highest Klout score belongs to Starbucks at 78, with Whole Foods coming in a close second at 75
The brand with the most followers on the list is Whole Foods with 2,137,890
The most prolific Twitter account belongs to Chipotle with over 63,598 tweets
The favorite Twitter client of the Top 10 brands is by far CoTweet, with Tweetdeck and then Twitter.com a distant 2nd, 3rd
The brand to send the most mobile tweets is Bergdorf with their constant chronicling of New York City

And Now To The Winners

We actually have a top 12, not a top 10. Our judging criteria resulted in five blogs with a tied score for the final and 8th place. All are worthy of highlighting, so the list was expanded by two. Let us know what you think of the results in the comments.