The methodology behind the BR 200
Today Brand Republic released the BR 200, a list of “the best advertising, marketing, media, PR and digital blogs from around the world, ranked in terms of traffic and social influence”. We Are Social is listed in 2nd place, behind only the mighty Seth Godin. Somewhat flattered and surprised, we reached out to Dominick Soar of Brandwatch, the company who calculate the rankings, to understand more about their methodology.
The BR 200 started with a pre-selected list compiled by Brand Republic using desktop research and crowd-sourced recommendations from Twitter (for any blogs that might have been missed, BR are accepting submissions and future iterations of the list will be updated accordingly), which was then given to Brandwatch for ranking.
The factors we consider include metrics regarding site traffic, MozRank and data from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The algorithm we use will evolve, but is already relatively complex. Where it differs from other methods of blog-ranking is in its encompassing the social presences of those involved with the blog.
So, while metrics pertaining purely to the blog itself (such as site traffic, sites linking in etc) were taken into account, we also included analysis of the authors on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Taking into account the social element like this meant that scores were boosted the more linked up the blog was with the authors’ various social profiles.
That’s all we can really say for now without completely revealing all our secrets…
We’d like to congratulate all those who made the list this time round, and in particular those fighting for the top spots. Clearly you’re doing a great job of blogging popular content and also keeping it social!
Brandwatch is one of Europe’s leading social media monitoring companies, covering and analysing online conversations across 16 languages. Brandwatch worked with Brand Republic to rank 200 of the web’s most influential advertising, marketing, media, PR and digital bloggers.