Sprinklr Launches the Social Index, a New Benchmark for How Brands Win the Moments That Matter
The benchmark highlights diverging trends between brand activity and audience experience — and what top performers do differently.
Based on more than 1 million interactions across 1,160 brands over 11 months, the Index shows a consistent gap between activity and impact: most brands fail to generate meaningful engagement or positive sentiment. Unlike traditional benchmarks, the Index compares brands against peers and adjusts for viral spikes to reflect sustained performance in real customer moments – not campaign-driven anomalies.
“Brands don’t lack visibility. They lack relevance,” said
From Activity to Impact: What the Data Shows
The Sprinklr Social Index evaluates brand performance using a single normalized 0–10 score built from two factors: how brands show up and how audiences respond.
- The Brand Index measures activity (posting cadence, responsiveness, content performance)
- The Audience Experience Index measures impact (engagement, earned conversation, sentiment)
Together, these measures reveal a widening gap between presence and perception: brands are active but not consistently engaging in the real-time moments that shape relevance.
Across industries, a consistent pattern emerges. While most brands are present and active on social, few are building meaningful relationships:
- High activity does not equal high impact: retail brands post more than any other sector, yet 78% fail to generate meaningful engagement.
- One-way publishing dominates: in technology, 76% of brands remain in Broadcast mode—posting around launches, then going silent—contributing to low sentiment and stalled momentum.
- Negative sentiment is widespread – but not inevitable: telecom brands show a –19 median sentiment and financial services 45% negative sentiment, yet top performers outperform by changing how they engage – not how often.
This gap is not a failure of effort, but of operating models. Most brands still manage social as a campaign-driven channel, while customer perception is shaped in real-time moments between campaigns. The result: brands show up often, but rarely in the moments that matter.
A New Model for Social Performance
To make these dynamics actionable, the Sprinklr Social Index (SI) assigns each brand in the study with a normalized score on a 0 to 10 scale, reflecting how effectively it shows up in the customer moments that shape perception relative to peers. The score is not intended as an absolute target; rather, it highlights the gap between activity and impact, showing if a brand’s presence is driving connection.
To make that score meaningful, the Index maps brands to a five-stage maturity ladder based on how they perform in real customer moments—not just how often they publish:
- Broadcast (SI 0–1.7): One-way publishing with minimal engagement
- Presence (SI 1.7–2.5): Consistent activity with shallow, reactive engagement
- Interaction (SI 2.5–3.5): Two-way dialogue and emerging community
- Resonance (SI 3.5–6): Strong emotional connection, advocacy, and trust
- Convergence (SI 6+): Unified, real-time engagement across social, care, and insights
Crossing into Resonance (SI 3.5+) marks a critical inflection point, the shift from activity to advocacy where brands begin to earn sustained engagement and trust. Convergence represents an operational breakthrough, unifying social, care, and AI-driven insights to enable real-time action across customer touchpoints. The upper end of the scale represents a theoretical ceiling, not an expected outcome, making progression between stages more important than the absolute number itself.
What Winning Looks Like
The Index shows that Resonance is achievable – even in high-pressure industries – when brands shift from volume to intention, by unifying social publishing, cross‑platform listening, and customer care signals into a single, real‑time operating model, rather than treating them as separate functions.
- Top retail brands post less but earn more, generating 7%+ engagement and significant earned mentions by showing up in cultural moments—not just their own feeds.
- High-performing financial brands sustain strong positive sentiment by responding quickly and resolving issues thoroughly.
- Leading telecom brands improve public sentiment by responding faster and communicating more clearly in moments of friction.
In every case, the difference is not volume, but relevance – how and when brands show up in the moments that shape perception.
A Meaningful Shift for Marketing and Brand Leaders
The Sprinklr Social Index signals a shift brands should start considering; visibility is table stakes, but connection drives advantage. Achieving Convergence requires always-on listening, AI to surface meaningful signals, and the ability to act in real time across teams. Brands that rely on fragmented tools and activity-based metrics risk becoming louder – not more relevant.
“The brands winning on social understand their audiences in real time – and act on that understanding,” said Corso.
More information about the Sprinklr Social Index report is available at https://www.sprinklr.com/resources/social-index-report/.
Methodology
The Sprinklr Social Index (SSI) is built from 1 million data points across 1,160 brands in five industries, collected over 11 months (
For each brand,
More information on the process of score building for the Sprinklr Social Index is available here.
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