SOCIAL MEDIA ZEITGEIST

What is the Beedier Zeitgeist List?

It is a comprehensive list of every architectural company in the UK and Ireland, ranked according to their aggregate social media follower count. You can browse the list page by page or jump to any company on the list by typing the name in the search prompt provided at the top.

Is the list really comprehensive?

Well, we are trying. We estimate that there are around 9,000 companies that practice architecture professionally in the UK and Ireland, although it’s hard to tell precisely. We arrived at this figure from estimates published by the Architect’s Council of Europe. We have currently tracked down approximately 7,500 companies and found that about 5,000 of those have some kind of social media presence. We will keep looking for the rest – the harder to find studios – so that we can add them in due course. And we will continue to check those already on the list for new social accounts.

How did Beedier put the list of companies together?

We look at yearly published lists by the RIBA, RIAS, RUSA and RIAI as well as the ARB directory – but this just accounts for the registered practices. In addition, we have referred to a range of other sources, including online directories such as architectsindex.com and theconstructioncentre.co.uk and others. Lastly, we have done a manual search, county by county, town by town, using Googlemaps data. We compiled this list ourselves using these methods and have not paid for company data from a third party. The process of doing this has been educational, as we have now looked at almost every single architectural website in the UK and Ireland – we have a pretty good feel now for your varied and collective web and social media strategies.

Who is included on the list?

Each company on the list practices architecture as their main service. It is not necessary that the company be professionally qualified with the RIBA or other organisations, provided they design building structures, extensions, or renovations. For this reason, we have omitted related professions from this list including interior designers, landscape architects, and multidisciplinary engineering practices who also deliver architectural services. We are we are planning for separate areas of the Beedier website for these specialisms, which will be launched in due course.

How did you source the company social media follower counts?

We are glad that you asked. This involved a long process of collecting social media account usernames for all the companies on our list, achieved through a combination of automatic scraping – a simple bit of code that retrieves social media details from your company website – alongside a long process of manual checking. In this case, many hands have made light work.

When we are convinced that we have all the account usernames for every company, we run more automatic scrapes to retrieve the follower count details from all the company social pages. Sometimes we find that companies have change their username, and if this happens, the data scrape will flag that up, and we can manually check the page to update the username, then add the count. This process takes a few days, to keep the counts as close as possible in timeframe.

Is automatically scraping data legal and ethical?

The internet is full of companies that provide useful services through the scraping of data and use much more sophisticated processes than we have used. For instance, price comparison sites: the notorious case of Ryanair v PR Aviation established a precedent in the EU, that databases of information are not subject to copyright law. Currently UK data law mirrors that of the EU, although this may change in due course. However, the scraping and recycling of original content, written or graphic, in our opinion is unethical. All of the written and creative content at Beedier is our own or has been commissioned directly by us.

Is there not a more efficient way of doing all this using AI or something?

If you know of a better way, and how to do it, then you are hired!

What about artificial manipulation of follower counts, doesn’t that skew the table?

When we see a company that has an unusually high follower count on one of the platforms, we check it using third party analysis tools. If the genuine follower count is below a certain threshold, it does not make the list. There are several ways of manipulating counts, and we don’t recommend any of them – chasing the number is pointless unless that number represents real people with an interest in your company. You are not increasing your status by having a lot of fake users following you. We will try our best to ensure that these accounts are taken off the list. Harsh but fair, right?

Why have you focussed on Instagram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn for this list?

Our research has informed us that these are by far the most common social medial platforms for architects. Yes, there are others that people like to use, including Pinterest, YouTube, Behance and Houzz. We have also noticed some companies have introduced Threads accounts – and even spotted some links to defunct Google+ pages. Please update your websites!

Without a doubt, the next most popular social platform after the big four is Pinterest. We have started to add username data for this platform and may consider adding it to calculations in due course.

But why?

Competitor analysis: this is the obvious response to this very reasonable question. Who is performing well on the socials, and how are they performing well? In our professional marketing careers, we have often been asked to review the social media performance of competitors against our own, which is always a bit hit and miss, as you never quite know who is missing. We are aiming for this list to be comprehensive. You will be able to track your own social media performance in comparison to others, and over time this detail will reveal whether you have been successful or not, so that you might adjust your social media strategy accordingly.

Industry analytics: yes, you can review the analytics of your own pages, but we will aim to gain insights across the whole industry. Which social platforms are growing, which are losing followers, where is it possible to grow followers quickly, and how? We will post regular articles on these industry social media insights and will aim to make them interesting and useful.

Reviewing peaks in performance: we fully expect to see performance peaks from some of the companies on the list. If we notice a big jump one quarter in someone’s follower count – the first thing we will do is check whether it an natural jump, or has been artificially manipulated – it is easy to tell. If it is a natural jump, we will try to understand why, including talking directly to the Directors or communications teams at the company to find out what they did right. Did they just win a big award or contract? Has there been some positive press stories, or a key project just published? Or have they just been pumping out great content, and is their hash tagging on point? We can figure this out, and report back, so you can learn something too.

Collaboration: many architects these days are looking for other architectural collaborators – perhaps large practices looking to bring in fresh new talent for their masterplanning projects, or two regional practices who might combine experience to win a project that would have otherwise been out of their reach. You can use the list to review who else is working in your area and has a bit of a buzz about them. Asides from the established major players, we have found those that appear higher on the list are often the larger established practices with good regional professional networks, or younger start-ups with cool fresh ideas that are catching people’s eye. Perhaps two different practices of this nature could be a good match, for the right project? In addition, we are working to introduce similar lists for related professions – we hope that in time this will be a good source of information for project team building.

It’s fun: Who doesn’t like a big chart? And to see where you are on a big chart? And to see how far you have climbed every quarter?

There are downsides to publishing a chart like this too, right?

We fully acknowledge that ranking architectural companies according to their social media performance is just a very small part of a big picture. It tells you a number of things: how big is the practice, how established it is, how good it is at marketing, how “zeitgeisty” it is. What it doesn’t tell you is anything concrete about the quality of their project work, professionalism, and experience. That is what architectural awards, and quality management certification is for. The Beedier Zeitgeist list is really designed for those that are concerned about their social media performance, want to improve it, and are interested in understanding their social media following within a wider industry context.

For this reason, we want the list to be fun, but at the same time useful. If you find yourself lower than your expectations, then that should be productive information, rather than negative. It is better that you know. Look at what others are doing with their social media, read our articles about it, adjust your strategies. Then review if those strategies have worked.

We think that your data for us is incorrect, can we update it?

Firstly, apologies. If it is incorrect, then that probably means that we either have a wrong account username for you, or we have missed one of your accounts. So yes, please email us at info@beedier.com – we will be very keen to update your details. We strive to be as accurate and comprehensive as possible.

Can I ask to be taken off the list?

Yes, if you don’t want to be on the list, then please email us at info@beedier.com – and we will remove you. We will still track your data, as this is useful information for us to use to put together industry stats, but you will not find your name on the list, and we will not refer to you in our commentary. We are sorry that you don’t want to play.

 

Beedier Zeitgeist FAQ
V1, 01/12/2023