This Week's Social Media Power Rankings: GameStop Can't Stop

GameStop cemented its place atop the video game-buying world, Greenpeace banked on cute, and Levi's tricked you into thinking you like adventurous things in this week's rankings.

The social media sphere is an increasingly noisy place, especially for brands. But hiding somewhere in the static are strong signals from companies reaching their customers in innovative ways. The Social Business Index from Dachis Group provides a (free) real-time ranking of more than 30,000 global brands based on their social performance. Every week we're taking a tally of who's getting heard, what they're saying, and why it matters.

The Top 20 looks to be stable, with no giant shifts this week. But we did notice Zynga with a one-spot jump despite the news that they severely overpaid for Draw Something. But that jump into the top four may have something to do with a lack of momentum by NBC as we've now fully recovered from the Olympics and are tuning into NBC with a lot less frequency. Here's what's going on outside the top 20:

The big story of GameStop's 12-spot jump is well, a lot of really awesome video games have just been released. And GameStop has been the place to get them. "While it doesn’t appear the brand has any high-dollar social campaigns happening at the moment, they are cross-promoting a few video games (e.g. Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Halo 4, FIFA 13) and consoles (e.g. Wii U) on their Facebook and Google+ sites," the Dachis Group's Joe Pinaire told us. Just for reference, GameStop has close to 5 million fans on Facebook.  And as Pinaire notes, they might have not even tapped into their full potential (and that involves getting into Google +).  "We’re happy to see GameStop leveraging multiple channels to engage their heavy tech customer base, but must note that their copy-and-paste content strategy could be evolved to capture more value from their social fans" Pinaire told us. "Still, it does seem that they’ve struck a chord with their audience using Google+ and next we’ll be looking forward to the brand evolving their current content strategy to cater to each platform’s unique audience and capabilities."

"Greenpeace does a good job of using imagery of gorgeous wildlife and nature as an attempt to help people realize the impact of their actions," says the Dachis Group's Allison Squires. Case in point, this picture of a polar bear (which we'd argue wouldn't even get a second glance if it were on a shelf at a tacky gift shop) got some 6,000 "likes" on Facebook. "By tapping into people’s emotions and raising awareness of people who are already helping the cause through Facebook, Greenpeace is able to reach people on a personal level and extend the reach of the brand," says Squires who notes that having celebs like Jude Law and Radiohead back you up helps too.

Guys, you really really like that spoken word commercial don't you? "This is a pair of Levi's, buttons and rivets and pockets, and cuffs ..." says the commercial we just can't shake from our heads. And that means it's effective right? As Squires tells us, the official name for that campaign is actually called the "Go Forth" and it's actually doing really really well no matter how you feel about buttons and rivets and pocket and cu... okay, we'll stop. "One post last week garnered almost 70k likes and almost a thousand comments as people shared their enthusiasm for all of the extreme pictures from fan," Squires told us, adding that Levi's has accomplished a pretty tough task and managed to brand itself as an adventure company despite, you know, heavily promoting on the not really exciting and not really adventurous platform called Facebook.

Methodology: A project of the Dachis Group, a social business professional services group, the Social Business Index analyzes the conversations on social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others. The index, which currently covers approximately 25,0000 companies and 27,000 brands, detects behaviors and activities exhibited by these companies and analyzes their execution and effectiveness at driving outcomes such as brand awareness, brand love, mind share, and advocacy. The Atlantic Wire takes a snapshot of the rankings at the end of the day on Sundays.