Apple is Europes most popular brand on social media, according to a report from social analytics firm NetBase.

Apple received 2.27m organic positive mentions on social media between April 2015 and March 2016. According to NetBase, the five most common positive terms in the brands social mentions were love, best, great, perfect and awesome.

Google was a distant second, with 1.26m mentions, but still far ahead of any of the rest of the list. Lego came third with 280,000 mentions and BMW fourth with 157,000.

Apple and Google together accounted for 22 per cent of all mentions of the 50 brands included in the study.

“Understanding consumer preference is more than simply measuring the volume of social media content,” said Netbase CMO Paige Leidig. “It’s about understanding the intensity of passion and feeling in those posts. Most consumer purchases are won on emotion.”

The data was gathered using NetBase’s social media listening platform, analysing English- and French-language posts from across Europe.