The results of a new study initiated by ComBlu found that Retail is the leader of the pack when it comes to maintaining active online communities. But despite this top-billing, most retail brands and those in the eight other industries analyzed are still in the social marketing experimentation stage. The other industries analyzed for the study were: Auto, Entertainment, Financial Services, Healthcare, Online Services, Packaged Goods, Technology, and Communications.

The only other industry with a similar level of success was online services. While 90% of the brands studied had an official presence on popular social media platforms, only 56% were integrating that presence with their branded communities, a move that ComBlu believes contributes greatly to a brands success.

So, while a brand may have a huge presence on Facebook, they may not necessarily bring that same level of engagement back to their branded community or vice-versa, cross- promote on Twitter or share on YouTube. While one community may be the brands shining star, the others across its ecosystem are underperforming or orphaned, according to the study. And of all nine industries, healthcare ranked at the bottom of the list with virtually no integration with social media.

Retail reigned supreme (along with telecommunications and online services) largely due a long history with dynamic online tools, given that ecommerce was pioneered by retail in partnership with technology and online services.

Auto, healthcare and entertainment had the highest level of community ghost towns. One industry the researchers had a hard time understanding was entertainment, characterized in this excerpt.

“Consumers of entertainment have a natural passion for their favorite programs, characters and programming. Yet the industry fails to leverage that passion and connect via community.”

Some missed opportunities were: Mini Cooper due to it’s lack of rewards and recognition, content search and syndication, and Bravo due to it’s lack of user-generated content tools. Walmart and Target had very active communities.  The researchers did adhere to a list of best practices to come up with scores for each individual brand, which can be found here.