While Boston is most known for technology and finance, when it comes to being recognized in the public company domain, Massachusetts is also known for being home to many large services companies. Of the eighty-two best performing Massachusetts public companies on this years Globe 100, ten were in the services sector (as compared to nineteen in the technology sector), accounting for over a tenth of all companies.
We took a look at these ten companies to find the five with the best Twitter presences, defined by number of followers, number of tweets, and the quality of those tweets (scroll to the bottom for a snapshot of all ten):
#1 Forrester
NASDAQ: FORR
Market cap: 722.66M
Main Twitter handle: Forrester
Globe 100 ranking: 68
Headquarters: Cambridge
Forrester Research was founded in 1983 as an independent technology and market research firm. The company filed its IPO in 1996, its second public offering in 2000, and today employs over 1000 people. The company offers reports and events to IT professionals, marketing and strategy professionals, and technology industry leaders. Forrester has over 2500 client companies and boasted $233.4M in revenues last year.
Forrester is very active on Twitter, regularly tweeting questions, facts, and insights from their reports and events. They often include analyst Twitter handles in their tweets if in relation to a report, which is a great way to find and follow other people with industry specific knowledge. Forrester’s Twitter following puts most of us (companies included) to shame, boasting well over 50,000 followers and listed by over 4,000 other people.
#2 Sapient Corp.
NASDAQ: SAPE
Market cap: 1.67B
Main Twitter handle: SapientNitro
Globe 100 ranking: 16
Headquarters: Boston
Sapient is one of the world’s largest interactive agencies and professional services company, employing over 7,000 people in offices across the globe. Sapient offers interactive marketing and design services, web and interactive development, media planning and buying, campaign creation and development for mobile and emerging technologies and strategic planning and marketing analytics. Sapient Corp. has three arms: SapientNitro is their traditional advertising agency arm, Sapient Government Services provides consulting and technology services to governmental agencies, and Sapient Global Markets group provides advisory and analytical services to financial markets.
While both Government Services and Nitro groups have twitter handles, SapientNitro is most active and enjoys the largest following. Over 5,800 people follow the handle, and the company tweets daily about everything from consumer trends to good links about new media.
#3 athenahealth
NASDAQ: ATHN
Market cap: 1.50B
Main Twitter handle: athenahealth
Globe 100 ranking: 53
Headquarters: Watertown
athenahealth provides physician and health practices with online practice management solutions, including electronic medical records, billing and other healthcare business services. The company was founded in 1997 as a women’s health practice in San Diego, California. Confronted with difficulties getting reimbursed by insurance providers and unable to find a practice management solution, they entered the software space to develop its own. The company moved its headquarters to Waltham and went public in 2007. The company boasted $140M last year in revenues and employs nearly a thousand people.
athenahealth tweets daily about healthcare and the technology trends driving their software, such as the cloud. Expect quotes, great links, hashtags, and lots of @ replies from this Twitter account, which has amassed over 600 followers.
#4 NSTAR
NYSE: NST
Market cap: 4.34B
Main Twitter handle: NSTAR_News
Globe 100 ranking: 21
Headquarters: Boston
NSTAR provides electricity and natural gas to those in eastern and central Massachusetts (1.4 million customers). The utility company was formed in 1999 by the merger between BEC Energy and Commonwealth Energy System and employs over 3,000 employees. NSTAR is investor-owned and boasted revenues of approximately $3 billion last year.
NSTAR has over 320 followers on Twitter and tweets on average once every week or so. Most of their tweet activity is pushed out announcements relating to their services, prices, or when there is a service outage.
#5 Mac-Gray Corp.
NYSE: TUC
Market cap: 203.87M
Main Twitter handle: Mac-GrayILS
Globe 100 ranking: 48
Headquarters: Waltham
Mac-Gray was founded in 1929 and today is North America’s leading laundry facilities contractor. The company operates in the commercial laundry industry providing laundry equipment, proprietary technologies like online monitoring, as well as customer service and technical support. Mac-Gray’s customers include academic institutions, multi-family housing units, on-site laundry facilities, military and government facilities, and hotels.
While Mac-Gray doesn’t have quite as many followers as some of Massachusetts’ other large service providers, the company tweets daily. Most tweets are related to the brand’s campaigns and contests, but they also include information about the company’s products and their focus on being environmentally conscious.
Here is a snapshot of all ten of the best-performing public services companies in Massachusetts on Twitter:
