Utility Social Media Scan

We monitor utility social media trends to help you stay relevant and gauge public sentiment about industry key topics, including financial assistance, 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 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

Learn how utilities communicate important topics with their customers on social media, such as storms 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.

Study methodology and participants. We conducted the review portion of the study across four quarters—January to March, April to June, July to September, and October to December. We included 100 utilities across 52 territories and provinces in the US and Canada.

The review covered 5 cooperative utilities, 25 municipal utilities, and 55 investor-owned utilities in the US. It also included 15 utilities or energy efficiency organizations across 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 following social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, and X.

Eligibility and sampling. We separated the audience size requirement from the utility type:

• Investor-owned utilities. 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.

Cross-channel audience. The total number of followers across all tracked social media channels.

We examined each organization’s social media channels to confirm the utility was actively posting during the review period; the total number of posts had to be greater than 10.

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

Engagement metrics. We scanned posts with engagement rates higher than the median engagement rate by follower for each topic during the review period. This metric is different from engagement rate.

• Average engagement total by follower. The total interactions on a post, per follower (on the appropriate channel), expressed as a percentage.
• Average engagement total. The total number of engagement actions (on the appropriate channel).