A little over a year ago, for the first time we undertook to identify the most influential Latvian brands on Twitter on a monthly basis. And we’ve fully lived up to our promise – over the course of the year, eight different brands have managed to reach first place in the most influential brands chart and more than 120 brands have featured in the Top 50 at one time or another, while the year’s most influential brand was "Ir" magazine.

The year was not only intensive for us, but also for Twitter – during this period the number of Twitter users in Latvia doubled. These developments have underlined the need for us to continue our work and move it onto a higher level by making significant changes. Since November we’ve been assisted in our efforts by LETA news agency which has created WebRadar which is the only Internet and social media analysis tool in the Baltics to automatically track and monitor social networks throughout the Baltics according to keywords.

With the growing number of Twitter users, the number of brands on Twitter has increased so fast that it’s hard to know the exact number. Therefore, we are inviting all corporate account holders that have joined all Twitter recently, and which we haven’t identified ourselves, to add their brands to list of brands being tracked. This isn’t all though – in addition to tracking the growing number of users, we have also made further additions to our service so that we can identify the influence of brands themselves. To the three aspects of brand communications – influence, topicality, popularity – which we’ve studied up until now, we’ve now added a fourth – engagement. With its assistance, this year and in years to come we undertake to ascertain just how actively the audience engages in dialogues with brands. By combining these four indicators, we’ll be able to identify more accurately which brands make the best use of their Twitter profile, as well as increasingly influential by expanding the amount of news published by people about the brand.

The new version of Twitter’s most influential brands chart can be viewed here.

We firmly believe that this year will be twice as active and interesting! We hope it will be for you too!