Adam Brousek's benchmark rates Czech brands on Instagram

Founder and CEO of the Prague agency Hustle Adam Brousek has launched Social Pulse, a project unique to the Czech market — an independent benchmark that, for the first time, rates brands not by the size of their Instagram following but by how effectively companies actually engage with their followers.

Since 2017, Hustle has run social media for major clients such as Česká spořitelna, KitKat and Pilulka, so Brousek knows corporate content from the inside. In his observation, almost everyone today can shoot a vertical video — from banks to real estate agents — but regular posts made to a content plan often go unanswered by the audience. “The problem isn't that companies can't make content. The problem is that it's created according to a strategy and pushed through a chain of approvals, rather than based on what actually interests people on the other side of the screen,” he explains.

It's precisely this gap that Hustle set out to measure. Social Pulse is built on the idea that reach and follower growth can be bought, but engagement cannot. The larger a brand's audience, the harder it is to keep a high share of genuinely responsive users — so a small company with smart content can easily outrank a giant with a budget in the millions.

Brousek and his colleague, performance strategist Josef Olšák, borrowed the methodology from foreign counterparts — the American Rival IQ (which calculates engagement per follower rather than in absolute numbers, using an industry median instead of an average) and Gartner Digital IQ, which uses a single composite score based on weighted criteria within one industry. “We compare a bank with a bank, not with an online shop — otherwise the number wouldn't mean anything,” Olšák stresses.

The final metric — the Social Efficiency Score, from 0 to 100 — is made up of six components: audience engagement (30% weight), the frequency and quality of vertical video (20%), posting regularity (15%), community comment management (15%), content nativeness (15%) and follower growth (just 5%). Budget, company turnover and audience size have no bearing on the calculation.

The first study covered 157 brands across 18 industries. Air Bank came out on top with a score of 77.2, though no participant cleared the 80-point mark. Mobile operators work best with their audiences, while online media perform worst. Real estate companies turned out to be the video champions: reels make up 70% of their posts, against roughly half the market average. Banks, meanwhile, shoot quality video but get no audience growth in return — it has essentially stalled.