Utility Social Media Scan

We monitor utility social media trends to help you stay relevant and gauge public sentiment about industry key topics, including storm and outage information, wildfires, rate and billing, community involvement, and infrastructure. The E Source Utility Social Media Scan identifies utility trends and topics to boost your online presence and increase social media engagement.

The E Source Utility Social Media Scan reviews US and Canadian utilities’ social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, and X. The review focuses on four areas:

• Utility topics and trends
• Content performance
• Content quality and clarity
• Engagement and community interaction

Learn how utilities communicate important topics with their customers on social media, such as storm and outages, wildfires, rates and billing, community involvement, and infrastructure. You’ll also get insights into which content performs best, how customers react, and how utilities may be engaging with them further in the comments.

The review can help you identify what’s working for utilities that receive high engagement and use this information to create more engaging social media content. This can lead to audience growth and brand visibility.

The Utility Social Media Scan:

• Identifies strengths and weaknesses in utility companies’ social media strategies
• Provides actionable insights based on data-driven analysis
• Helps utilities optimize engagement with their target audiences
• Showcases best practices for content, engagement, and accessibility
• Showcases top-performing content for different topics that utilities communicate about on social media

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Methodology

The Utility Social Media Scan includes natural gas, electric, and dual-fueled companies in the US and Canada.

We conducted the review portion of the study across two quarters, April to June and October to December. We included 100 utilities covering 52 territories and provinces across the US and Canada.

The review covered 5 cooperative utilities, 25 municipal utilities, and 55 investor-owned utilities (IOUs) from the US. It also reviewed 15 utilities or energy efficiency organizations covering each province in Canada.

We separated US and Canadian utilities during the search to account for differences in regulatory environments, which allowed us to evaluate variations in content and audience engagement between the two regions.

Utilities reviewed had an active presence on one or more of the three social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, and X.

We looked at the cross-channel audience, which is the total number of followers across all tracked social channels. We separated the audience size requirement from the utility type:

• IOU. Cross-channel audience greater than 30,000.
• Municipal. Cross-channel audience greater than 10,000.
• Cooperative. Cross-channel audience greater than 1,000.
• Energy efficiency organizations. Cross-channel audience greater than 2,000.
• Crown corporations. Cross-channel audience greater than 2,000.

We examined each organization’s social media channels to make sure the utility was actively posting during the time we conducted the review portion of the study; the total number of posts had to be greater than 10.

For each topic, we looked at a sample of 25–35 social media posts to evaluate performance within each topical area. We used engagement rate by follower as the primary metric to evaluate performance and looked at the median across the posts within each topical area. For some topics, if one utility had multiple top-performing posts, we included one to five of the utility’s posts as part of our initial evaluation before adding posts from other utilities to the topic. For Canadian utility social media posts, we often had to include more posts from the same organizations due to the small sample size.

The average engagement total by follower is the total interactions on the post per follower (on the appropriate channel) and expressed as a percentage, and the average engagement total is the total number of engagement actions (on the appropriate channel). We scanned the posts that were higher than the median engagement rate by follower for each post topic during the review period. This metric is different than engagement rate.