What really puts a city on the map? Talent, investment, employment are all taken as read. But when it comes to branding and recognition, there are few tools more effective for raising profiles than digital mentions.
As we navigate our way through the streets of Europe’s cities, whether in our home towns or as visitors, there can be almost a 100% guarantee that swathes of the people we pass will be glued to a digital device. They might be checking a map, they might be texting or making a call, or they might be posting on social media.
And herein lies an interesting and growing trend. From Twitter to Facebook, Instagram to Snapchat, we are no longer just building digital profiles for ourselves, but for the places and things around us – and cities are no exception.
Responding to this growing trend, communications agency ING Media has reordered Europe’s Top 40 cities based on global indices by their share of online conversation. For investors and industries like tech and real estate, this could prove a crucial tool when it comes to selecting the right locations for inward investment or new offices.
“Visibility matters to cities,” says Leanne Tritton, managing director of ING. “It influences investment, where talent concentrates and whether we decide to visit or not.”
Here, we list ING’s top 40 cities before delving into some of the more nuanced results, including the top five cities punching above their weight for digital mentions and the top five with the most digital profile potential.
The most talked about cities by share of total online mentions (%)
These cities generate significantly more mentions on digital media relative to their positions on city indices, presenting an opportunity to climb the rankings by consistently improving the quality and impact of the conversations about them. Their category shares show significant variance, highlighting areas in which these cities can potentially consolidate a lead.
- None of these cities perform more strongly for traditional news coverage, except Rome, but benefit from huge amounts of user-generated content. Rome is the top performer overall for forum mentions and does particularly well on blogs too. But the percentage of conversations about Rome taking place in English are the lowest for any city.
- Lyon’s online visibility ranking is 23 places higher than its city ranking. This is driven by conversations around technology. Rome scores the highest shares for culture and liveability.
- Cities with higher business category shares tend to have higher talent shares too, such as Geneva and Manchester. In Geneva, this conversation is concentrated on Twitter and online news.
- Edinburgh also outshines on Twitter, but has relatively low news coverage. In contrast, Hamburg’s otherwise solid performance includes limited Twitter coverage, despite the city’s strong interest in talking about technology online.
Global city rankings highlight these as cities we should pay attention to, but this doesn’t necessarily translate to the digital world, where these cities attract fewer mentions than their peers. Therefore, these are the cities with the highest potential to develop their digital profiles over the coming years.
- Despite being ranked lower than Oslo, Copenhagen and Zurich by city rankings, Stockholm is generally talked about more than these cities on digital media.
- Warsaw shows a strong pairing of culture and liveability (like Rome) with the highest share for both category shares for this group of cities. Copenhagen has a similar profile.
- Zurich’s business focus is apparent with the highest shares for business and talent. But it also has the lowest digital conversation shares for culture and liveability.
While the share of conversations by category for the top five cities are substantially similar, London’s dominance as Europe’s financial centre is reflected in having higher shares in the business and talent categories. Madrid and Barcelona feature strongly in technology.
How the rankings were compiled
ING’s investigation into Europe’s most talked about cities covered 222 cities in 46 countries included in a diverse set of 23 publicly available global city rankings.
This aggregated list of top 40 cities appearing on city indices were then ranked by total 2018 digital mentions on Twitter, forums, blogs, news, Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram (partial data set).
Spelling variants were included for English, Chinese (simplified), Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, German, French, Malaysian, Indonesian and the city’s local language, representing over 90% of total online mentions.
Mentions containing sport were limited. Category shares, generated from a set of keywords unique to each category, represent only English mentions.
To send feedback, e-mail emily.wright@egi.co.uk or tweet @EmilyW_9 or @estatesgazette
