It is now well documented that Twitter activity has reached a plateau recently and in the previous monthly Twitter Index report, we registered a drop in the activity from the insurance companies, this was speculated to be a result of competing activities. This month we saw, for the first time a slow-down in followers. While the follower increase, in any other marketing function, would be impressive – a month on month growth of 11 percent; it is down from the previous two monthly increases of 21% and 18%.

Key Findings

• USAA continues to hold substantial lead for follower count
• Progressive offers most Twitter Customer Service
• StateFarm continues to lead in marketing reach
• Twitter Messsage volume steady but down from peak
• Follower count increasing but at slower pace
• Geico enters the Twitter space

As Twitter matures, the role is becoming clearer; there are two distinct functions sometimes performed by separate groups in the company under different twitter identities.

Customer Outreach – this is a customer service function searching for customers expressing problems or concerns with existing policies or the ability to purchase a policy. Progressive is by far the strongest industry player for this activity with over 75% of Twitter activities directed to individuals.

Marketing, word of mouth – pushing the message out through social media is just another process to drive customers and prospects to the company materials – when they think insurance, they think of the company. Social media can drive word of mouth, referrals and viral marketing. Allstate, USAA, Nationwide all see this as the primary role of Twitter.

As a hybrid model, Esurance starting with an outreach program based upon the success of Comcast. This has morphed into two programs, one still focused on outreach (now named esurancecares), while the original identity has transitioned onto marketing messages (esurance). This has illustrated an interesting problem. While ‘esurance’ were very active with outreach from the inception, once this activity was migrated to a ‘customer service’ group, it has all but ceased. Very often, the initial stages of Social Media are conducted by very dedicated, highly qualified senior people that see it as a seed change and bring a lot of energy; can it scale and the esurance example brings that into question.

The Allstate twitter account is managed entirely by a senior marketing manager and while customers questions are responded to, and quite actively, the primary activity is to market. Allstate plan to scale up by recruiting new people, presumably not as senior, can they scale the same success?

USAA engages in little or no dialogue from its main twitter identity even though it has quite a few other employees on twitter that do engage. The role is to send out, relatively infrequent, messages to its 7000 followers. USAA follower recruitment is actively supported by a ‘Connect with USAA’ webpage linking to their Facebook, Twitter and YouTube identities. Recruitment of followers and fans (on Facebook) has great marketing potential moving forward. As an example, recently AT&T responded to Verizon’s negative TV ads by sending a letter to its fans on Facebook, therefore directly speaking to some of their best customers. Changes in Facebook will also allow marketers to send ads and messages, not only to their fans, but also to friends of their fans. This will identify which of your friends is a fan of the company, providing a level of endorsement.

On that note, the company’s with the top follower count, and best positioned to market are:

Key Takeaways

• Geico have started to embrace Twitter and we have seen an initial burst of follower recruitment.
• American Family now have 2 ‘competing’ Twitter identities, a common issue as Social media is adopted by multiple group without a corporate strategy
• The top followed companies slowed follower recruitment significantly
• Esurancecares has failed to take over the reins of customer outreach
• USAA lead the follower count for 6^th month in a row

Marketing Reach

One of the primary uses of Twitter is for straightforward marketing. Companies can point to additional content, as is the case with Allstate. Allstate manages a community blog, and a YouTube channel with a range of ‘informative’ content. StateFarm and Nationwide spend time driving customers to sporting and other events they sponsor such as NASCAR. Liberty Mutual promotes their Responsibility Project heavily through Twitter. USAA make announcements and in this month focused on Veteran Day activity and the expansion of customer eligibility.

The marketing reach table is based upon the combination of the number of messages and maximum distribution for each message.

StateFarm continues to lead the reach table, as they have done for the previous 4 months but the numbers are down from the early summer days. Part of the drop is due to a reduced level of updates being sent. This was especially true for Nationwide that sent out just 31 updates from a high of 197 in August.

The reach of USAA continues to lag despite its dominance in follower count; this again is due to a low level of updates, just 26 last month compares to 134 from StateFarm. How many updates is optimum? The jury is out but Tweets scroll off the bottom of the page so many followers do not see the majority of updates sent. Allstate reach also dropped for the month but the marketing manager was also active in the speaker circuit last month, which shows the conflicts that can arise.

Customer /Service

Other industries, especially telecommunications, are using social media to provide customer service outreach programs. The volumes are very low compared to traditional channels with volume as low as 1 in 1000 against call centers even for the most successful. The key proponents for that strategy in the insurance industry are Progressive. Providing support is hard; Twitter is not a secure channel and the customer and company must mutually “follow” each other to create a direct message capability. Even then 140 characters is enough to express frustration but not to solve problem. Most companies look to channel switch to the telephone or webforms.

This is confirmed by viewing typical Progressive twitter dialog.

To see the extent of interactive conversations or dialog in Twitter, we created the Conversation Index. The higher the number, the greater the one on one dialog. The lower, the more straight marketing is taking place.